section_path: Early life/Family and background
section_name: Family and background
paragraph_text: Family and background
  
  Albanese was born on 2 March 1963 at St Margaret's Hospital in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. He is the son of Carlo Albanese and Maryanne Ellery (1936–2002). His mother was Australian, while his Italian father was from Barletta, Apulia. His parents met in March 1962 on a voyage from Sydney to Southampton, England, on the Sitmar Line 's TSS Fairsky, where his father worked as a steward, but did not continue their relationship afterwards, going their separate ways. Albanese's mother adopted Carlo's surname for herself and named Anthony after his cousin Anthony Howett, who had died in a car accident in Northern New South Wales four years earlier.
  
  Growing up, Albanese was told that his father had died in a car accident; he did not meet his father, who was in fact still alive, until 2009, tracking him down initially with the assistance of John Faulkner, Carnival Australia's CEO Ann Sherry (the parent company of P&O, which acquired the Sitmar Line in 1988) and maritime historian Rob Henderson, and then later the Australian Embassy in Italy and ambassador Amanda Vanstone. He made contact with his father in 2009, visiting him a number of times in Italy, and also took his family there. His father died in 2014. He subsequently discovered that he had two half-siblings. During the Australian parliamentary eligibility crisis of 2017, it was noted that, although birth to an Italian father would ordinarily confer citizenship by descent, Albanese had no father recorded on his birth certificate and thus meets the parliamentary eligibility requirements of section 44 of the Constitution.