Marche by Foot

The soul of this Italian seaside region might just be its soles

Shoes from the Santoni shoe factory, Macerata in the Province of Le Marche (illustration by John Donohue)

Forgive me if I, as a fan of the author Elena Ferrante, readily associate the fate of Italian footwear with the fate of the nation at large. For the rise and fall of Lila Cerullo in My Brilliant Friend and its sequels is intimately connected with Lila’s ingenious concept for a beautiful shoe and her inability to make that shoe into something that will help her escape desperate poverty.

Fortunately for some shoemakers in Italy the opposite has proved true.

On the third day of our tour of the Marche region, fate landed us at the Santoni shoe factory in the town of Macerata. There we saw a unique experiment that is, so far, bucking a global trend. Unlike the majority of shoes that are flooding into Europe from Asia, Santoni’s are sourced entirely from Italian materials and manufactured by craftspeople based in Italy.

To a large extent this, like so much of what we’ve seen in Marche, goes back to deep history. The rise of Marche as Italy’s shoe capital dates back to the 15th…