And so Rosa painted the Dolomites.

Rosa’s mural proceeded in fits and starts. She made sketches and tore up sketches. She started outlining the mountains, then painted over the outlines. She decided on a grid, and then decided that she couldn’t possibly work within the confines of a grid. In the meantime, the restaurant was closed because there were dropsheets over everything and the place stank of paint.

Mr Parish arrived at unpredictable times and smoked a pipe and bossed Rosa around.

‘Rosa, that mountain looks like a bloody camel’s hump!’ ‘Too much foreshortening in the foreground, Rosa! That hut’s about to roll into the valley!’ ‘What are you doing, Rosa! It isn’t Stonehenge!’

He was enjoying himself. Rosa took no notice.

She threw herself into action, hauling in ladders, kicking away dropsheets and slowly but surely bringing to life her craggy, much-loved Dolomites, until finally there they hung, in their entirety, tremulous, snow-capped, against a crisp winter sky that was just turning dark.

Rosa’s mural was a hit. Two days after its completion a reporter from the Melbourne Herald came with a photographer and a flashbulb on a stick and before they knew it, Rosa and Restaurant 123 were in the papers, Rosa looking a little squatter than she would’ve liked but beaming her famous smile, and the peaks of the Dolomites rising behind her in soft drifts of pinkish cloud. The restaurant was never empty again.

THE WEDDING MENU

You know the story from here. 123 was a success. Papa started making money. Rosa got a few clients: one wanted the Cappadocian Caves in her dining room; another wanted the south of France, trompe l’eoil style.

Mother and Papa were married at St Peter and Paul’s Church in South Melbourne in 1959. There was confetti, or rice, because you can see it in a black-and-white photograph, raining down on them. Mother’s ducking her head and Papa’s laughing up at it. There are other photographs, but I don’t know whether to believe them. A portrait shot of the happy couple, for instance: Mother’s mouth slightly parted to reveal a millimetre of white teeth; Papa gazing proprietorially down at the top of Mother’s head. Is there any truth in that photo? Papa looks like a conman and Mother looks positively sedated. And what’s going on with their heights? Papa, looking down on Mother? What, did the photographer stand him on a milk-crate?

Then there’s a photo of the family gathered around the wedding cake: not the croquembouche pyramid that Nonno had planned, but a three-tiered Anglo monstrosity—inch-thick icing with a slab of fruit-cake inside, the kind of cake that will survive decades wrapped up in a piece of tinfoil. I bet there were fifty-three dessert plates untouched at the end of the night.

The cake was provided by the Grays, Mother’s family, who weren’t convinced by Papa and his adopted Italians, and were clearly dubious about Veda, their black sheep. There are no photographs to document that, though. It was you who told me how, when Nonno tried to kiss both sides of Grandmother Gray’s face, she pulled herself back in shock and knocked a floral arrangement off a table.