The Anatomy of an Italian Shoe: What the Last Decides

Sergio Rossi, who founded the San Mauro Pascoli shoemaking house that bears his name, could look at a last brought into his workshop and answer without hesitation: tre millimetri di meno a destra. Three millimetres less on the right. Nothing more.

The account comes from a tribute by the journalist Aldo Premoli, written when Rossi died in April 2020, and it is told as one of the stories that still circulate about him. The object in it is a block of wood a few tens of centimetres long, shaped like a foot, which no one who buys the finished shoe will ever see.

What the block decided stays behind: in the lift of the toe, the pitch of the heel, the way the shoe holds a foot. A last is usually made for a sample size, and the other sizes in the range are derived from it.

A shape that leaves the room

A last, in Italian a forma, is not a copy of a foot. It has no separate toes and it runs slightly longer than the foot it is made for: a generalised foot, with the proportions of a shoe already built into it.

Premoli describes how a last of that kind began: a block of rosewood or ash, worked with a rasp, sandpaper and filler, shaped and reshaped over days. Plastic lasts now commonly start as a moulded blank, roughly shaped for its size, which a computer-controlled lathe turns down. The toe and heel are then checked against templates and, at some makers, still finished by hand. One company in Forlì, Formificio Romagnolo, has made lasts since 1942 and describes itself as the largest producer of plastic lasts and wooden shoe trees in Europe. It is in Forlì, not San Mauro, and it is mentioned as an example of what a last maker is, not as a supplier to the district’s shoemakers.

Then the form has to leave. It has to come out through the opening of the finished shoe. Lasts in an American museum’s collection, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a removable block, or a hole at the end where a hook could be inserted, or both. Some later lasts are hinged: a stationary front section, and a heel section that swings out of the way so that the form can be drawn from the shoe.

From the side

Put a court shoe on a table and look at it from the side, level with the sole. The last is already visible.

The toe lifts a little off the surface. This lift, which makers call toe spring, is one of the standard measurements of a last: the elevation of the toe tip above the ground. The heel raises the back of the shoe, and between the two the sole arches. The arch is structural. Inside a heeled shoe a shank, usually of metal in high heels, runs between insole and outsole from the heel to about the beginning of the ball of the foot, and it is what lets the heel hold its lift.

The shoe on this table is a court shoe, in Italian a décolleté, because high-end women’s footwear is San Mauro’s specialism, as CERCAL, the district’s training school, describes it. A textbook chapter that CERCAL wrote with the Politecnico Calzaturiero uses the décolleté as one of two worked examples, and calls the last, from the stylistic point of view, the essence of a new model. The geometry itself is common to heeled footwear everywhere, and no source for this article gives the figures any San Mauro house gives its lasts.

What the heel carries

In descriptions of stilettos, heel height runs from about two and a half centimetres to fourteen.

In a laboratory study at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, volunteers standing quietly in shoes with 10 cm heels carried nearly 60 per cent of their body weight on the toes and the ball of the foot. That is almost double the load in flat shoes. A second study from the same university combined measurements with a computer model of the foot. As the heel rose, the centre of pressure moved from the middle of the foot towards the front, and the area in contact with the ground fell by 26 per cent between a flat shoe and a heel of 10.2 centimetres.

Both measure heel height in laboratory conditions, and neither describes a particular shoe. But that height is itself a measurement of the last, taken from the point where the heel meets the ground. For Premoli, a shoe that has to be beautiful, alluring and comfortable at once begins with a block of wood.

From above

Look down at the toe. Its outline is the last’s. A technical paper sorts lasts by toe shape: pointed, oval, round, square, among others. Under the outline, the height of the toe box and the width across the forefoot decide how much room the toes have.

Inside the lining at the toe is a reinforcement, the puntale, which helps the toe keep that outline once the last has gone.

From behind

Turn the shoe round. From behind, a pair shows whether it was made as a pair. Inspection guides written for buyers and manufacturers say that a finished shoe should sit straight on its sole and that the back height and lines of the two shoes should match; held sole to sole, the pair should match in length. They have a name for the defect in which part of one shoe stands higher or lower than the same part of its partner: “hi-low”.

Behind the leather at the heel is a stiffener, the contrafforte, which gives the heel cup its hold. The heel itself may be wood, or plastic inside with a leather covering, and the shank is out of sight between insole and outsole.

A size is a length

A size number mainly promises length. The last decides the rest: how wide the forefoot is, how high the instep rises, how much room the toes have, how firmly the heel is held. That is why two pairs marked the same size can fit very differently.

Ludwig Reiter, an Austrian maker of welted shoes, describes the “Victor” last that it developed with Formificio Romagnolo in these terms: a wider forefoot and a lower instep, for a more relaxed fit. It is a welted shoe, not a high-heeled one, but it shows what “a new last” means in practice. A change in forefoot width and instep height, made once at the last, alters how every shoe built on it fits.

One last, a whole size run

A shoe is not designed in every size. It is designed in a small number of sample sizes, and the rest are graded from them.

According to a paper presented in Lugano in 2019, the grading method used to produce the other lasts was established in the 1930s and still works in only two dimensions: the length of the last and its technical ball circumference. The same paper says that today’s 3D CAD systems still follow the principle of mechanical last copying from machines of that period. A European patent on grading describes copying machines that alter dimensions unevenly, so that a size 40 is not simply a size 36 enlarged.

A regional professional profile for the footwear modeller includes the ability to foresee how a shoe will fit across the development of sizes.

Where the form is taught

At CERCAL in San Mauro, the modeller’s course begins with the last. Its first module, thirty hours long, is called Forme; it is followed by 164 hours of technical drawing and modelling and 40 of CAD.

A second, shorter course is about the fitting trial, the prova calzata. CERCAL describes it as thirty hours, one five-hour session a week, taught by a technician who spent more than forty years at a leading Italian last maker, working with major brands on last design and fitting trials. Its programme has participants measure a foot and find the reference points that matter, try a court shoe on it and decide what should change on the last. Then they go to the laboratory, alter the last and check the correction.

The table again

One footwear maker, writing about its own lasts, says that changes of only a few millimetres can significantly alter how a shoe feels on the foot. Rossi, in the story, asked for three millimetres less, and added nothing.