Peter Callea has long been a familiar sight in Melbourne's inner-west.

From the window of his Somerville Road shoe repair store in Kingsville, you might have seen him stretching leather, stitching a new sole or hammering in a heel.

It's here that customers drop off their favourite work shoes worn through with a hole, or the stilettos they busted on the dancefloor at their cousin's wedding or the leather boots they spent far too much money on years ago, and still can't bear to part with.

And it's here that Peter, with his wife Nerina at his side, has gone to work for the past 65 years, hammering and stitching all those loved shoes back together.

"It is very, very rewarding, very pleasing to know we can help people," Nerina explains of their work.

The process of repairing shoes, of creating a second chance for the already scuffed and worn, has taught the couple plenty of life lessons.

"I would say it teaches you to appreciate things and to make things and save instead of just throwing something out," Nerina says.

They're lessons that also echo through from the couple's childhood years where they both grew up in a time of war.

Two separate journeys to Melbourne and a chance meeting in church

Peter and Nerina migrated separately to Melbourne from Italy, as young adults in the 1950s, having lived through the hardship and trauma of World War Two.

Nerina comes from just outside Trieste in Northern Italy.

Nerina's father was taken by soldiers in 1943, when she was five-and-a-half years old and the family were taking a short trip to visit relatives.

They had stopped to rest for a night during their travels, when soldiers came and rounded up all of the men in that village.

Later, as the rest of the family tried to make their way home without her father, Nerina says they saw "people on the road, in the fields, they were shot dead".

After that, Nerina says she never again asked for her dad.

Even at her very young age, she thinks she understood that he had been killed.

It was 13 years later that Nerina and her mother migrated to Melbourne, starting her adult life in Australia.

Peter had already moved from Calabria by then and was working in his business.

He'd learnt to make shoes in Italy, where he would hand make a pair of shoes each day from scratch.

The couple met at church — which along with family and work has been the third pillar of the pair's lives.

For Nerina her Catholicism has always been a link back to her father.

In the heart of Melbourne's west, the Calleas keep their shop going for decades

For more than 60 years the Calleas repaired shoes and raised their four children on Somerville Road.

In the shop Peter spent long hours working.

"He was flat out all of the time, he was working 10-12 hours a day and half a day on a Saturday," his wife remembers.

But he wasn't always alone.

Here work and family life has only ever been separated by the three steps between the shop front and the Callea's home, which Peter built at the back of the business.

Nerina would work in the store at the end of the day, when her mother looked after her and Peter's four children.

She says when her children were little and not sleeping properly there were times she was so tired, she'd doze off the minute she had a chance to sit down.

"Peter would say 'hey did you come here to sleep or to work?" Nerina explains with a laugh.

Later, the children helped out too.

"My daughter, the third daughter Rosanna, she was always cleaning the bench where Peter was working," Nerina says.

The couple understands the hardship many young families and small business owners are going through now in these difficult economic times, having themselves weathered recessions and periods of high interest rates before.

"We could just manage, there were no luxuries in our lives like going out to dinner and things like that or holidays," Nerina says matter-of-factly.

While it wasn't easy, she says, it was rewarding for Peter to have a job he enjoyed and where he felt he was appreciated by his customers.

The business, she says, helped the family forge deep connections in the Kingsville community.

As time creeps on, Peter and Nerina aren't sure how long they have left

While Peter and Nerina have continued to open their shop door, things have become harder.

Now, many of us buy new shoes when our soles are worn down, or a heel breaks.

Nerina says that's largely because our shoes are not as well made as they used to be.

"The quality of the shoes was much better, it was rubber or leather, it was a genuine thing not plastic like now," she explains.

The pair have also had their own health battles in the last couple of years.

At 85 Nerina has had a couple of recent falls and now uses a walking stick while her husband was diagnosed with dementia two years ago at the age of 87.

He can still repair shoes, with a little prompting from his wife but Nerina says they have had to think about how long they can keep going for.

"I would be happy if he makes it to 90," she says of her husband's milestone birthday, coming up in September.

But the pair aren't setting a retirement date yet.

For a while yet, you'll still be able to catch Peter through the window of his Somerville Road shop, hammering and stitching new life into old shoes.