Between the Apennines and the Adriatic, the hills of Fermo and Macerata have been making shoes since the 14th century. In the eighth day of the Decameron, Boccaccio tells the story of a judge from Sant'Elpidio, summoned to Florence — and notes in passing that the shoes from Montegranaro and Sant'Elpidio a Mare were so prized they were exported as far as the Balkans. Six hundred years later, the same hills still craft shoes exported around the world.
The ateliers multiplied across the villages over generations, each one specialising in one step, one component, one precise decision in the making of a shoe. This knowledge never consolidated into large factories. It stayed local, passed from hand to hand.
This is what a real industrial district looks like from the inside. A dense and interdependent ecosystem. The disappearance of one atelier changes what is possible for those that remain. A handcrafted sneaker might pass through a dozen specialists within a few miles of each other — each one adding something, having practiced that operation for decades, passing it on to the next.
In 2024, 1,430 companies disappeared from the Fermo district alone.
What disappears with them cannot be relocated. It is a precise expertise — learned over a lifetime, refined over generations, existing nowhere else at the same level. Working here means accepting a different relationship with scarcity. The leather for one of our styles came from a tannery that no longer exists. That hide will never be reordered. The atelier that hand-builds the leather midsole of our Myrha is the last in the region to master this process. Without it, this shoe would not exist.
Accessing this expertise has a cost. Weeks of delays that accumulate — but it is an entire industry, entire lives, that depend on it.
We produce here because the knowledge is still present. That knowledge is what gives a made in Italy sneaker meaning beyond the label it carries. When the ateliers close — and they are closing, one after another — that meaning dies with them.
