By Sean Reynolds, author Melbourne Ghost Signs
Down the long stretch of Somerville Road, the sign still hangs out front of the little shop window where, for more than six decades, a man bent over a bench, coaxing another life out of a pair of battered shoes. Inside, the steady rhythm of hammer and nail was the soundtrack of Kingsville. His name was Pietro ‘Peter’ Callea, and if you ever walked through that door with a broken heel or a sole worn paper-thin, chances are you walked out feeling like you’d been stitched back together too.
From Calabria to Kingsville
Peter arrived in Melbourne from Italy in the 1950s, carrying the craft he’d honed in Calabria — making and mending shoes. Each pair in those days was built to last; hand-cut, hand-stitched, the kind of craft that leaves no shortcuts. In Melbourne he met Nerina, who had fled the ruins of war in Northern Italy. They met at church, and soon after built a life together in the west. Work, family, and faith — that was their trinity.
The shop that never slept
By the early 1960s, Peter had set up his cobbler’s shop at 220 Somerville Road, building not just the business but also a family home directly behind it. Ten-hour days, six days a week, became routine. One after another, they came through the door: tradies who needed their boots patched before Monday, mums with scuffed school shoes, bridesmaids with stilettos busted on the dance floor. Nerina worked alongside him, their four kids helping out after school, polishing benches and running errands.
For locals, the shop became part of the fabric of the neighbourhood. It wasn’t just where you fixed your shoes — it was where you heard the gossip, shared a story, and sometimes lingered a little longer to watch the master at work.
The sole of the West
Shoes are metaphors waiting to happen, and Peter and Nerina knew it. Every repair was a second chance, a small act of resistance against a disposable world. They had lived through war, loss, and migration. They knew what it meant to mend, to hold on, to keep walking. As Nerina put it in a 2023 ABC News article by Elise Kinsella: ‘It teaches you to appreciate things and to make things and save instead of just throwing something out.’
The final stitch
Time, though, is the one thing no cobbler can repair. As the decades passed, shoes themselves changed — cheaper, plastic, barely worth fixing. Still, Peter kept going. Even as dementia crept in during his late eighties, he could still hammer a heel with a little prompting. Nerina, cane in hand, stayed by his side, laughing that sometimes she was so tired she’d fall asleep in the shop until Peter nudged her awake.
On 29 August 2025, just days shy of his 92nd birthday, Pietro Callea passed away. The hammer is silent now, the shop shuttered. But for 65 years, Peter and Nerina stitched their story into Kingsville in the quiet rhythm of leather and thread.
Out front, the ghost sign still calls to motorists and pedestrians alike: ‘P. Callea While-U-Wait Expert Shoe Repairs.’ This relic now holds the last secrets of a lost trade, the memory of a life spent in service of others, the faint rhythm of hammer on sole still echoing through a little shop on Somerville Road.
