There aren't many men who can claim to have literally built Canberra from the ground up, but 78-year-old bricklayer Dante Gaspari can.
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From the Maltese Embassy in O'Malley to Narrabundah College and a bevy of backyard pizza ovens for friends in the inner south, Dante's bricklaying skills are responsible for some of the capital's most significant and treasured brick structures.
But after 64 years as a bricklayer - the past 57 years in Canberra - the time has come for Dante to turn off the mixer, put down the trowel and head into retirement.
"I'm going fishing," he said.
A young Dante was already a hardworking bricklayer in his home town of Ascoli, Italy, about 180km north-east of Rome, when he decided to emigrate to Australia in 1960 with his twin brother and an older brother.
The Gaspari brothers had been trained to lay bricks by a small company in their home town.
The trio arrived in Canberra and immediately set to work, boarding in O'Connor and building government homes in Canberra's inner north and south. The red bricks they transported and laid were, of course, sourced from the Yarralumla Brickworks and stamped with 'Canberra Commonwealth'.
"There was no lake back then and Canberra only had 35,000 people," Dante recalled.
"The first government house I built was in Monaro Crescent in Red Hill, back in 1962.
"And since then we built a few houses every year."
By the early 1970s the Gaspari brothers had enough money to work on three very personal projects - building their own homes side-by-side on Springvale Drive in Hawker, where Dante still lives to this day.
Highlights of Dante's career include working on sections of Campbell High School and spending every day for four years travelling to O'Malley, where he built four houses in total. This included the 80,000-brick Maltese Embassy.
Gaspari Bros became builders in their own right, building many quality homes in Canberra over the years for the sales market. Former builder and long-term friend Duscan Cavic described Dante as "a very good person and an extremely good and reliable bricklayer".
If he had to guess, Dante said he'd laid five million bricks in Canberra since 1960.
So how's his back after all this time?
"It's still OK," he said.
"Because I'm smaller, so I have less bending to do."
Dante said he'll miss bricklaying, especially meeting new Canberrans, and putting his own stamp on a little part of their lives.
"You leave something behind, something that's quality," he said.
