Father and Son are very proud of their country and have a compassionate approach towards many of the challenges facing Italy today. As passionate supporters of the local community, they have also embraced the migrant crisis affecting Italy, by personally supporting education and employment opportunities for refugees who have gained legal status in Italy, at their family-run business. Shop Luxury Footwear. Luxury Bags. Luxury Accessories. Now 79, Andrea continues to work daily, employing his problem-solving skills to resolve complex production issues.
But there are historical touchstones, of course. A third-generation shoemaker, Della Valle grew up watching his father and grandfather ply their craft. Today, the hand-stitched moccasin lined with rubber pebbles on the sole remains its best seller, offered in hundreds of colours and a variety of skins.
Della Valle and Santoni remain dedicated to sustaining old-world Italian artisanship and attracting a new generation to the trade. Forcing this masterpiece of engineering to accommodate a fancy design seems—how may I put this? And whatever happens to the foot will make itself felt over time—to the ankle, the knee, the hip, and the back.
An American podiatrist once told New York magazine that, by age 40, about 80 percent of the American population has some musculoskeletal foot or ankle problem. By age 50 to 55, that number can rise to 90 or 95 percent. To reach the shop, walk up the Frezzeria, an ancient street that is only about feet long and a mere seven feet wide.
Everyone has seen images of these canals—the Byzantine flourishes and arched window-frames, the gleaming water washing doorsteps and even windows. Daniela readily acknowledges that people from hot climates who wear sandals have beautiful feet. But barefoot? Daniela picked up a pair of slingback shoes with a modest wedge heel, which she had just finished.
The shoe was dark blue, but the toe and the heel strap were a sumptuous red—and snakeskin, no less—anaconda, to be exact. These are people who have had to wear ugly shoes all their life. D aniela is Venetian, a fact which until , when the Venetian Republic fell, would have told you almost everything you needed to know about her. For a thousand years the island republic built a great part of its wealth by trading or producing goods that were either rare or of universally recognized quality, objects of international desire; some were state secrets, guarded and priced accordingly.
Murano glass could be blown to gossamer. Diamond-cutting began in Venice. In a city the size of a postage stamp there were 71 workshops devoted exclusively to stamping gold leaf onto leather to cover books, chairs, walls. Gold was everywhere: On the facades of palaces, in the glass tesserae of mosaics, on picture frames, on gondolas, embroidered on silk. No particular style of shoe can be identified as Venetian apart from the celebrated chopine , a platform slipper once in vogue with noblewomen that could rise so high—one source says 11 inches—that she needed to steady herself when walking by holding onto the heads of her young servants.
Venetians are drawn to the fanciful or frivolous, however, and their cordwainers were especially talented at making shoes with feminine flair. Calegheri used new leather for shoes and boots; zavateri made slippers of old, used leather; patitari made pattens, or wooden soles which were attached by strips of leather to the shoes as protection from the filthy streets; socholari made zoccoli, or wooden shoes; and solari cut out leather soles which the poorer people simply tied to their stockinged feet.
At its peak of power, tiny little Venice was the most populous city in Europe, and the census counted capomaestri , or master shoemakers, garzoni , or apprentices, workers, and shops. The romance of the magical floating city dwells in its rippling canals and iridescent lagoon, but the reality of the former Queen of the Seas is stone streets and walking. Everyday life is a sort of industrial stress test, like they do for airplane wings and fire doors, but in this case for shoes.
Veronique Magrini, petite, chic, French, a licensed tour guide and four-year client, knows this far too well because she walks several miles a day leading tourists around. When I came into the shop one day she had just brought in a pair of cream-colored leather sandals with a two-inch heel that Daniela had recently made. They looked like they had done the Annapurna Circuit, the leather stretched and loosening, the heel beginning to go off kilter, there was a tear in the leather covering the heel, and what was most annoying, the additional piece of fine leather lining directly under her foot had begun to scrunch up and irritate the skin.
And very kind. Word of mouth seems to be working just fine. Why not buy some real walking shoes? If I had to start dressing like a little old lady…. We drift onto the subject of her family, and her father who lives alone and calls her every night and asks her to come home.
Tears well up, and she chokes them back, apologizing. From joy, from pain, from memories….. What she really had to start learning was patience. The materials of course require patience. The real challenge, though, was the five men working in the shop: the cutter, the assembler, the sewer, and the repairman, plus Rolando.
They were something like 50 years older than she and had been making shoes all their life. They can destroy your life, but it gave me tenacity. Designing a shoe may have glamour, but to make one is hard labor. The physical exertion required, not necessarily by any individual task but in the repetition of it, can be intense. The first step is soaking it in water, then hammering it for hours to soften it. Then there is scraping, to reduce the piece to the desired thinness for the contrafforte , or counter the extra reinforcing piece inside the shoe behind the heel.
While we talked, Daniela was scraping leather with the edge of a piece of window glass, pressing down with each stroke, in small measured movements, at just the angle necessary to shave away curling little tendrils of hide. It looked tiring and somewhat boring; but like every step it must be done carefully, which means slowly. Skimp on one phase and you create problems for yourself in the next. For more detail, read our sidebar about how handmade shoes are really handmade. Almost everything a cordwainer does takes muscle—cutting, hammering, rasping, burnishing.
I spent a whole year learning how to pare the leather, paring, paring… My entire shoulder swelled up. It took months to heal. Her goal was to produce strips of a near transparent thinness. This required slicing the leather horizontally, removing layers in narrow ribbons. The depth of each slice had to perfectly match the preceding slice, whose thickness could only have been measured in microns.
The fragrance of leather floats in the air, wafting from myriad rolls stashed on her shelves. Pigskin is the oldest leather known, but there is also, to name a few at random, ostrich, manta ray, lamb, anaconda, and horse.
Another shoemaker once joked that she felt like she was working in a stable. Chemicals are added in the tanning process to combat bacteria, but there are still small tanneries that use chemicals quite sparsely, and those that specialize in vegetal tanning use tree bark.
The exception to the minimum-chemical rule is reptile, for which chemicals are a must, largely to make the leather pliable. Another reason a crocodile shoe will be expensive is that only a master cordwainer can handle it. When Daniela showed me a crocodile sandal, deep red and shiny, I could see the raised plaques, the reptile equivalent of chain mail.
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