I did not know his name, but I loved him just a little bit. I thought of him as ‘Mr Pellegrini’, or in absent-minded moments as Mr Pellegrino. But his name was Sisto Malaspina and he was loved by a city, and most everyone who visited that city and were blessed enough to find their way to him.
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I found my way to Pellegrini’s bar and cafe in the late 1980s, when I was couch surfing around the country. A friend, another writer, had moved to Melbourne and when I landed on his couch he insisted we go grab a coffee at Pellegrini’s. I remember it as though it was last night. A Friday evening in the city, the long, cramped bar crowded with Melbourne film buffs on a break from some nearby festival. I was the only one not dressed in black.
I recall the coffee as a revelation, but I don’t remember the man behind the bar from that first visit. He would have been too busy making sure everybody was served and everyone was happy. But I do remember him from many, many later visits; so many of them firsts.
A first date. A first book tour. A first trip with my wife, and later with our kids.
You couldn’t go to Melbourne and not go to Pellegrini’s at least once.
When a friend visited from the US, I followed him down to Melbourne just to take him there. Whenever I found myself in the city alone, almost always for work, it was a lay down certainty that you’d eventually find me perched on one of the stools at the bar, reading a book or a magazine I’d just bought at Hill of Content or the second-hand place across the laneway.
There was a printed quote behind the bar, by Robert Morely, I think: “No man is lonely eating spaghetti.”
And no soul could ever truly be alone when taking their ease at Pellegrini’s. Sisto Malaspina would not have it.
You could go years between visits and he would make you feel as welcome when he next saw you as when you were last there. The cartoonist Jon Kudelka recalled on Twitter his first ever visit to Pellegrini’s.
“I was wearing my black T-shirt and my black jeans and I lost my nerve the first time and walked past and bought a book at Hill Of Content instead, then I went back clutching my copy of On The Road and ordered a short black at the bar and felt like the most sophisticated Tasmanian who ever went abroad.”
Virginia Trioli was devastated.
“I’ve known Sisto’s smiling, beautiful face all my life,” she wrote. “My first coffee, my first date, my Melbourne life.”
Jeff Martin replied that he changed Melbourne twice, once with his charm and then with his loss.
I cried out aloud, “No!” when I read the news on my phone.
I am sure many did.
His murder is a grave loss to the city and beyond.
