Melbourne cinemas provided an invaluable opportunity for the Italian community to gather and speak and hear their language, in a time when very little non-English media was available. When SBS and video came along, everything changed.

In this series, Choc-tops and Cassata, part of The Secret Life of Language, hosts Elisabetta Ferrari (Italian Studies Program) and Mark Nicholls (Screen and Cultural Studies) are joined by comedian, writer and producer Santo Cilauro to dig into the ways Italian language films shaped the cultural life of Melbourne.

In this episode of Choc-tops and Cassata, guests Carlo and Giovanni Zeccola invite our hosts to step back into the 1970s and join them on a lively Saturday night at the Metropolitan. Their family ran this Italian language cinema in Melbourne’s inner northern suburb of Brunswick from the late 1960s to the early ‘80s. Patrons rolled up at the grand 1920s-era, 1800-seat theatre dressed in their finest, ordering cassata and orange cordial from a very young Giovanni, who ushered them to their seats.

Choc-tops and Cassata is a mini-series of The Secret Life of Language, a podcast from the University of Melbourne’s School of Languages and Linguistics. The series was produced and edited by Elisabetta Ferrari, Alice Garner and Gavin Nebauer. Recorded and mixed by Gavin Nebauer at the Horwood Recording Studio, the University of Melbourne.

Choc-tops and Cassata is made with support from ACIS (Australasian Centre for Italian Studies)

If you have any stories or info about the Melbourne cinema scene as discussed in the podcast, please feel free to contact us at [email protected]

The Secret Life of Language is licensed under Creative Commons.