Gino

Luigi Saccone has possibly the best-known name in Fremantle, in the familiar form of Gino, due to the enduring popularity of [[../buildings/ginos.html|Gino's]], the coffee-shop he started on the corner of South Terrace and Market Street in 1983.

Gino's webpage:
“I was a tailor, started when I was 6 years old. My father, mother, all my family tailors. I came from a little village straight to Fremantle. Fremantle’s the best place to live, the best. I started about 30 years ago with Sorrento Tailors on the corner here, for twenty two years, tailoring! Every morning I start at four o’clock. I used to go to the Marina Coffee Lounge in the morning and I always complain the coffee is no good. I say, ‘Look, you don’t want to make better coffee, change your coffee or I open a coffee shop!’ For a joke, then I say to my wife, ‘We’re going to Italy for a holiday’. After I arrived over there I go and look for coffee. I never say anything to anybody. I come back after six weeks, I put ‘Close Down Sale’ in the window, close down men’s wear store. My wife she come down and went crazy!
‘What are you doing there?’
'I want to open a coffee shop; Gino’s.'
My wife, she didn’t want me to do that but I wanted to do something different.
Twenty-ninth of November it’s eleven years!
Now I go through one hundred and fifty kilo of coffee a week.
For thirty two years I’ve been on this corner, always this corner, and the people, they like my coffee.”
Gino Saccone 1937-2001, from the Gino's webpage, as is the image.

References and Links

Gino's website

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 15 August, 2016 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/saccone.html (it was last updated on 15 March, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.