My private Italy: Italian leather and the Italians behind it

In Florence, the streets still remember who used to work in them. Walk out of Piazza Santa Croce towards the river and read the white marble plaques on the corners: Via delle Conce, the street of the tanneries; Via dei Conciatori, the street of the tanners; Corso dei Tintori, where the dyers rinsed cloth and hides in the Arno; even Via dei Saponai, the soap makers. For centuries this neighbourhood smelled of bark, lime and wet leather, and the city simply wrote down what it saw. A map of trades, hidden in plain sight.

The tanneries left Santa Croce long ago. The skill never did. Let me take you along the leather trail, from a medieval guild to the benches of the last great bespoke masters.

A guild, a river and two great masters that conquered the world

Working leather in Italy is older than Italy itself. In medieval Florence the tanners belonged to the Arte dei Cuoiai e Galigai, and they settled in Santa Croce for a very practical reason: tanning needs huge amounts of water, and a neighbourhood on the edge of town, by the river, was the only place a city could tolerate the smell.

Here’s the part that surprises most people on my tours: the great fashion houses did not invent this world, they were born from it.

Guccio Gucci was a young Florentine who went to London and found work at the Savoy Hotel. Day after day he carried the trunks, hatboxes and travel bags of the richest guests in Europe, and he learned something no school could teach him: elegant people judge you by your luggage. In 1921 he opened a small shop of leather goods in Florence, in Via della Vigna Nuova, looking to the world of horses and saddlery for inspiration.

His genius showed in hard times. In the 1930s, when Italy was hit by sanctions and leather became scarce, his workshop turned to woven hemp and canvas. After the war, in 1947, his artisans heated and bent Japanese cane over a flame to make bag handles, and the Bamboo bag was born. In 1953 came the horsebit loafer.

Salvatore Ferragamo’s story is even more of a novel. He was born in 1898 in Bonito, a village near Avellino, the eleventh of fourteen children, and at nine he made his first pair of shoes for his sisters’ confirmation. At fourteen he emigrated to America and ended up in California, where the young film industry needed boots and sandals. Soon he was making shoes for Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson, and he enrolled at university to study anatomy, determined to understand why feet hurt. His answer, a supporting arch inside the shoe, is still used today.

In 1927 he came home and chose Florence, because only there could he find enough skilled hands. He went bankrupt in 1933, but did not give up: when leather and steel were short, he invented the cork wedge heel, copied all over the world. In the 1930s he bought the medieval Palazzo Spini Feroni, by the Santa Trinita bridge, which is still the company’s home and, since 1995, the Museo Ferragamo, where you can admire the lasts of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn.

Why Tuscany makes the best leather in the world

Why do the world’s most famous names keep coming back to Tuscany? Two reasons: what goes into the leather, and the hands that work it.

It starts with the hide. Follow the Arno west from Florence towards Pisa and you enter the Distretto del Cuoio, the leather district, spread across seven small towns around Santa Croce sull’Arno, Fucecchio, Ponte a Egola and Castelfranco di Sotto. The first tannery in Santa Croce opened in 1824, thanks to the river and to the forests that supplied the bark for tanning. Today around 600 companies and more than 8,000 people work here. The district tans roughly a third of all Italy’s hides, almost all of its sole leather, and is considered the leading leather centre in Europe.

Its signature is vegetable tanning, la concia al vegetale. Instead of fast chemical baths that take hours, the hides soak slowly for weeks in tannins extracted from chestnut and mimosa wood. The result is firm, full-bodied leather that does something no synthetic material can: it ages beautifully. With time and use it darkens, softens and develops a “patina”, the warm glow you see on an old Florentine bag. And because the luxury houses know where their quality comes from, several of them, from LVMH to Kering and Chanel, have bought stakes in Tuscan tanneries in recent years.

Then come the hands. Upriver, on the edge of Florence, the hides reach Scandicci, quite literally the back room of global luxury. In 2018 Gucci opened its ArtLab here, 37,000 square metres where around 800 people prototype and test leather goods and shoes; Saint Laurent has its own leather atelier nearby, and Richemont has recently expanded its hub in the same district.

Why here, and not somewhere cheaper? Because leather is not a material you can simply programme. A skin has a character, with scars that a good cutter reads like a map before laying down a single pattern. Then someone shaves the edges so thin they can be folded, someone else paints those edges by hand in several coats, another stitches, another fits the brass buckles made by a metalworker down the road. Each step has its own specialists, often small family workshops, all within an hour’s drive, and the knowledge passes from parent to child and from master to apprentice. It is not a factory, it is an ecosystem and no brand can move that with a spreadsheet.

Le Marche and Vigevano: Italy’s shoe towns

Cross the Apennines to the Adriatic and you reach the Marche. Between Fermo and Macerata, hill towns such as Montegranaro, Sant’Elpidio a Mare, Monte Urano and Civitanova Marche form Italy’s largest shoemaking district: roughly one Italian shoe in three is made in this region. Families worked for generations in small rooms under their homes before those rooms grew into names like Tod’s and Santoni. Start at the Museo della Calzatura “Cav. Vincenzo Andolfi” in Sant’Elpidio a Mare.

Half an hour south-west of Milan, among the rice fields of the Lomellina, lies a place close to my heart. Vigevano is famous for one of the most beautiful squares in Italy, Piazza Ducale, designed in the 1490s for Ludovico il Moro, with the Sforza castle towering behind it. But for Italians, Vigevano means one thing: shoes.

The story is long. A municipal statute already mentions shoemakers here in 1392. The first industrial shoe factory opened in 1866, and in 1901 the town began building the machines to make shoes. In the 1950s and 1960s, its golden age, the town produced more than 21 million pairs a year, and Vigevano proudly claims that the stiletto heel was born here in 1953.

Climb the ramp into the castle and visit the Museo Internazionale della Calzatura “Pietro Bertolini”: about 300 shoes from every century and every corner of the world, and one small treasure I always save for last: a pianella, a delicate slipper that belonged to Beatrice d’Este, the young wife of Ludovico il Moro, made around 1490. Entrance is free; check the short opening hours.

The art of making shoes by hand

Now for the real thing: su misura, bespoke. I always tell my guests that it is the most Italian way to buy something: you are not buying an object, you are commissioning a small piece of someone’s life.

It begins with your bare feet on a sheet of paper. The master traces their outline, then measures the width, the instep, the heel and the arch. From those notes he carves the last, a block of beech wood shaped by hand into a sculpture of your foot. It is kept with your name on it, ready for every future pair.

Next comes a trial shoe, made in cheap leather and glued, which you wear for a few minutes while the master presses, pinches and marks it with chalk. The last is corrected. Only then is the real leather chosen and cut: the cutter lays the pattern on the skin, avoiding every scar, so that the softest part falls where your foot bends.

The pieces of the upper are stitched together, then pulled tight over the last and left to rest for days, until the leather remembers the shape. The welt is sewn by hand, one hole at a time, with an awl and waxed linen thread; the sole is attached, the heel built from layers of leather, and the edges trimmed and polished. Finally comes the colour, applied by hand in many thin coats, which gives each pair its own patina. Fifty hours of work or more, and several months of waiting.

Where to commission yours: Milan, Florence, Rome

Stivaleria Savoia – Milan. Founded in 1925 by craftsmen who made boots for the Savoia Cavalry regiment, it is a shop and workshop in one, with the makers at work in full view.

Stefano Bemer –Florence. A bespoke workshop inside a former church on the south bank of the Arno.

Roberto Ugolini – Florence, near Santo Spirito. The fourth generation of a family of shoemakers, devoted only to bespoke.

Calzoleria Petrocchi – Rome. A family workshop since 1946, which shod the film stars of Rome’s golden age and still builds every pair by hand, with a made-to-measure service for anyone who wants their own.

Silvano Lattanzi – Rome, by appointment. A master born in the Marche, whose shoes are hand-stitched and hand-welted, each with a dedication written inside.

Leather has a strange quality: it remembers. It takes the shape of your foot and the way you carry a bag on your hip. Perhaps that is why Italy has never forgotten it either, writing its trades into the names of its streets and keeping a duchess’s slipper in a castle for five hundred years. Next time you are in Santa Croce, stop under the plaque of Via delle Conce and breathe in. The smell is gone, but the hands are still here, just around the corner, waiting to make something that will outlast any trend.

Ciao da Marcello

Read other articles about Craftmanship:

My private Italy: Italian craftsmanship, a long history of creativity and passion

My private Italy: Why Florence is the true cradle of modern perfumery