FILOMENA IACOVINO – AUSTRALIA

Italian cuisine is loved all over the world because Italians are everywhere in the world, and the passion for food is synonymous with feeling at home! Filomena is also part of spreading the love for Italian gastronomy in Australia.

She was born in Grassano in 1927, the daughter of Angelo Marco Iacovino and Maria Maddalena Abbatangelo. Orphaned of her father at just 5 years old, she attended only the three years of basic primary school and spent her youth working in the fields with her sisters. She learned to sew, embroider, and cook by observing her mother.

Filomena met Pasquale Amato in 1946. As a soldier, he was a prisoner of war and spent years on a farm in Eastern Australia. The two love each other, and in 1948, they get married.

Filomena is pregnant, and the two spouses decide to emigrate. To pay for the journey, they sell part of their property, load their trunks onto the cart, and go to the Grassano station for a train to Naples. Then, on January 9, 1949, they begin the long journey by ship to Australia. As immigrants, the two are separated, and Filomena is in the barracks with women and children. She suffers during the journey, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat, and spends as much time as possible on the deck, embracing her husband and pondering about the future.

They arrive in Fremantle on February 25, 1949. Initially, they settle in the southwest of Australia, in Gnowangerup, a very small village. They live on a farm and raise sheep from which they obtain wool.

In 1949, their first daughter, Margherita, is born. With the arrival of Pasquale’s brother-in-law, Eustacchio, the two brothers-in-law leave the farm and enter the construction field.

In 1951, the family moves to Katanning, a slightly larger town. Here, three more children are born: Stefano, Angelo Marco, and Maria Maddalena. They open the Cafe of Rover in the town center, where Filomena puts her great passion to use: cooking. After several years, the couple moves again, this time to the coast in Albany, then to Torbay, where they open a cheese factory in 1963.

In the early 1970s, they move to Perth, where they begin producing Australian wine, their last gastronomic adventure.