• Rosa and Pasquale Martell—married 60 years.

“SOMETIMES you fight, sometimes you cuddle—sometimes you let it go,” Rosa Martella says after notching up 60 years of marriage to Pasquale.

Like her famous compatriot Juliet she was 13 when she met her then-19-year-old beau, and was just 15 when the couple married in their home town of Macchiagodena, in the Apennine mountains, 200km north of Rome.

“We grew up together,” Mrs Martella says.

An uncle sponsored and paid for Mr Martella’s passage to Australia two years later, but he had to leave behind his teenage wife and their baby daughter.

“It was a hard time,” he says of lonely years in a south-west timber mill, working long hours to repay his uncle and raise money to bring out his family from Italy.

But he could see a better life here than the one he’d left behind.

“I was not worried leaving, because I knew what things were like in [post-war] Italy.”

With neither Martellas speaking English, and having no car—nor even a fridge—it was a tough life for the reunited family living in the bush.

And while most locals were friendly they encountered some animosity.

“When we came here [some] people didn’t like us, calling us garlic munchers and spaghetti eaters: Now they eat more than us!” Mrs Martella laughs.

Others expressed fears the post-war influx of migrants would take all the land, leaving nothing for the kids of those already here.

“Not much has changed,” daughters Mary and Loretta quip, regarding the nasty tone underlying today’s attitude to immigrants and refugees.

Moving up from the country to work in construction, where Mr Martella became a foreman, the couple have lived in their East Fremantle home for more than 50 years.

It’s a place their four grown children and their own families gather to help transform more than 25 cartons of tomatoes into a rich sauce, and for the annual wine-making in the back garden.

by JENNY D’ANGER