There is a particular style of house found in suburbs across Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, homes built by the first wave of post-war southern European migrants.
Typically, they initially lived in the inner-city suburbs because it was cheap and close to employment opportunities.
As these communities became more established, many moved further out, buying large blocks of land and building their dream homes.
Maria Maruca is president of the ANFE Italian club in Brisbane.
"For them to have a timber home, in Italy, was not considered a sign of success," she said.
"That's why their dream was to build these big, beautiful homes out of brick."
"They stylised these homes to represent symbolically what they left back home and what they considered was a villa back in Italy."
In search of a better life
Gianna Denaro lives in Brisbane, her parents having migrated to Queensland from Sicily in the early 1950s.
"My father came to Australia looking for a better life," Ms Denaro said.
"He worked up in the cane fields in Far North Queensland during the winter and operated a prawn trawler on the Brisbane River in the summer."
Ms Denaro's parents had an arranged marriage and met for the first time when her father travelled to Sydney to pick up his new wife who had arrived by ship from Sicily.
"It wasn't love at first sight ... there was 14 years between them," Ms Denaro said.
"There was no turning back though; back then you just accepted it and got on with life."
For their first decade in Brisbane, Ms Denaro's parents lived in a timber Queenslander in the inner-city suburb of Tenerife.
Ms Denaro's father converted their house into four flats, eventually selling them and using the money to start his building career.
"They didn’t have a lot of money, but my father was determined to build this house, my mother also wanted to have her Italian brick home," Ms Denaro said.
"I never understood my parents' taste in interior decorating until I went to Italy myself."
"I stayed in an apartment on the Amalfi coast, and it was exactly the same style as my parents," Ms Denaro said.
"Even in the one room there was two different tile patterns on the floor, it was crazy, but it worked."
Ms Denaro's parents built their dream home gradually and the whole family got involved.
"We would go there on the weekends and clean up after the contractors had been," she said.
"After the tilers had been we would grout it, I tiled the upstairs bathroom and the ensuite."
The house stood out amongst the other houses in the street, which were all typical Queenslanders.
"It didn't matter to them if nobody else liked it, they did it their way," Ms Denaro said.
Angelo Cammarata's parents also came from Sicily to Queensland in the 1950s and like Ms Denaro, his father's first job was cutting cane.
His parents built several homes, but their castle was the home they built in the Brisbane suburb of Tarragindi.
"We found this Italian builder who had built two or three of these houses in similar style," Mr Cammarata said.
"My mother was four foot 11 but she liked everything big."
"The standard ceiling height was increased by 30 centimetres so she could fit her chandelier in.”
The house was made of double brick which kept downstairs cool but upstairs got hot and eventually air conditioning was installed.
“Everyone always commented on the red carpet which was the original carpet from when the house was built in 1981,” Mr Cammarata said.
"Structurally, it would take some sort of earthquake to move it."
Both Ms Denaro and Mr Cammarata's parents are no longer alive, and the properties have been sold.
