San Mauro Pascoli: How a Romagna Town Became a Centre of Italian Shoemaking

In San Mauro Pascoli, shoemaking was once part of the street.

In the years after the Second World War, when workshops were small and often crowded, shoemakers sometimes carried their benches outside during the warmer months. Leather, thread and tools moved into the open air. The work could be seen from the road, alongside houses, gardens and the remains of a rural economy. It was a very different world from the one associated today with San Mauro’s high-end footwear.

The beginnings were modest: a cobbler repairing a worn shoe, a deschetto — the small bench around which the work was organised — or a pair of shoes made close to home for someone from the surrounding countryside. In an economy where households often depended on several sources of income, shoemaking was one practical skill that could be turned into a living.

Over the decades, those small workshops multiplied. Some became factories. Production divided into specialised operations. New businesses appeared around them, making heels, soles, uppers and other components. The town’s shoes began travelling beyond Romagna, first into neighbouring European markets and later into the world of international fashion.

San Mauro Pascoli did not set out to become a footwear centre; it became one gradually.

Before the factory

San Mauro was a rural community long before it was a manufacturing centre. The earliest records gathered for the local footwear district point to shoemakers working in the area as far back as the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century, the calzolaio and ciabattino were established figures in local life, repairing footwear, making shoes on a small scale and working from homes or modest workshops.

The deschetto belonged to this world. A simple workbench, it was the centre of a trade that required relatively little space but considerable practical knowledge. A shoemaker could work close to home and, in some cases, payment did not necessarily involve money: local accounts describe exchanges involving food or other goods. The work fitted a rural economy in which agricultural labour remained dominant.

For the shoemaker, however, the bench offered something different. It was a skill that could be practised independently and gradually refined. As demand grew, the trade stopped being a way of supplementing agricultural income and became an occupation in its own right.

When repairing became making

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, local shoemakers increasingly moved beyond repair and began producing complete footwear for sale. A repair starts with something that already exists. Making a shoe means deciding what the object should be before it exists: its shape, materials, construction and proportions.

Once San Mauro’s shoemakers began producing complete shoes for markets beyond their immediate customers, they were no longer working only for people they knew. The town was beginning to make shoes for a market.

Local historical sources describe a growing concentration of shoemakers in the early twentieth century. Some of the more specific details preserved in municipal accounts — including the account of a dedicated shoemakers’ community and flag in 1901 — require further archival verification. The broader development is less uncertain: by this period, footwear had become an established part of the local economy. The First World War then gave the trade another push.

War and a changing trade

During the First World War, local shoemakers supplied military requirements. Historical accounts record relationships with military commissariats and indicate that some workers were exempted from military service because their work was regarded as necessary to the war effort. After the war, production continued to develop. Cooperatives appeared, and military orders remained a substantial part of the work during the difficult years of the interwar period.

At the same time, production was beginning to change. Some operations were still performed by hand. Waxed, multi-strand thread was used to make footwear more resistant to water. But machinery was gradually entering the process, allowing workshops to increase output and organise work differently. The old trade was acquiring an industrial rhythm.

The workshops in the streets

In the post-war years, small footwear workshops multiplied across San Mauro. The image preserved in the municipality’s history is unusually vivid: when the weather allowed, shoemakers would sometimes take their benches and tools outside because the workshops were too small to contain the work comfortably.

Agriculture was still part of everyday life, but footwear was becoming a larger source of employment. Families who had worked the land found opportunities in the growing workshops. What had once been a trade practised alongside rural work was becoming the centre of a new local economy.

Then the buildings began to change. During the economic expansion of the 1950s and 1960s, workshops grew larger and more organised. The capannone — the industrial shed — became a familiar part of the landscape. The construction of the MIR-MAR plant in 1957 is recorded as an early example of industrial-scale footwear production in San Mauro.

When craft became specialised

Mechanisation did not simply remove the shoemaker from the process. It also made it possible to divide the work. Instead of one person carrying out most operations, different specialists could concentrate on different stages of production.

Model development became a profession. Cutting became a specialised skill. So did upper making, heels, soles and other components. Expertise could now accumulate in several places at once.

A modeller did not need to be an expert cutter. A specialist heel maker did not need to construct the upper. A manufacturer could work with businesses nearby that understood a particular component in depth. That pattern would become one of the defining characteristics of the San Mauro Pascoli and Rubicone footwear district. CERCAL itself describes the area as having developed highly specialised skills around high-end women’s footwear.

The Riviera changes the market

The Adriatic coast provided another route out of the local economy. During the post-war decades, the Romagna Riviera was becoming one of Italy’s major tourist destinations. Rimini and Riccione drew visitors from across the country and increasingly from abroad. For local shoemakers, the summer market created demand for lighter, more fashionable footwear. The sandal was central to it.

Casadei traces its origins to 1958, when Quinto and Flora Casadei began producing sandals for tourists visiting the Italian Riviera. The business subsequently expanded into European and international markets. Sergio Rossi’s early history was similarly connected to sandals sold during the summer between Rimini and Riccione.

The Riviera brought San Mauro’s shoemakers into contact with a new relationship between footwear and fashion. A shoe could be bought as part of a holiday, worn for a season and chosen as an expression of style rather than simply as protection for the feet.

A 2019 exhibition at Villa Torlonia presented the sandal as a symbolic product in the emergence of the San Mauro Pascoli/Rubicone footwear district, linking it to the transformation of individual manual production into small businesses during the early 1960s.

For a town that would later become associated with high-end footwear, one of the routes outward began on the beach.

From Romagna to Europe

By the 1960s, shoes made in San Mauro were reaching markets beyond Italy, including France, Belgium and Germany. The timing mattered. Across Italy, manufacturing and design were acquiring a new international identity under the emerging reputation of Made in Italy. San Mauro had something to contribute to that story that went beyond the finished product.

By then, the town had accumulated manufacturers, specialist workshops and people who understood different stages of footwear development. The local network was beginning to count for as much as any single factory.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the relationship with fashion became increasingly visible. Companies such as Casadei, Sergio Rossi, Pollini and Baldinini became part of the wider history of Italian footwear, while numerous smaller businesses developed specialist capabilities around them. The famous names are only the most visible part of the story. Behind them was a productive landscape in which modelling, sampling, cutting, uppers, heels, soles, accessories and technical development could all be found within the wider district.

The label on a shoe could belong to one company. Its last might have been developed by another specialist, its upper cut elsewhere, its heel supplied by another workshop. This is what makes a footwear district different from a collection of factories.

A network built over time

The proximity of these businesses mattered. A manufacturer could work with a specialist supplier nearby. A modeller could develop a prototype with a workshop familiar with the practical demands of production. A component maker could respond to the needs of local footwear companies. Over time, those relationships became part of the productive fabric of the territory.

Research by CERCAL and the University of Bologna has examined this aspect of the Rubicone footwear district: its productive specialisation, social organisation and relationships between businesses. The result is difficult to reproduce simply by moving equipment into a new building somewhere else.

Learning a new way to make shoes

The district continued to evolve as technology changed. Contemporary footwear production in San Mauro combines manual skills with CAD, 3D modelling, scanning, specialised machinery and industrial processes. CERCAL’s training reflects the same combination, bringing together practical work and technological development.

For those working in the industry, the pressure of speed puts deep technical experience at risk. In 2018, CERCAL director Serena Musolesi observed that the pace of contemporary footwear production makes it difficult to accumulate profound experience in some technically decisive stages of the process.

The remark points to something easily missed when looking at a modern footwear district from the outside: technology can accelerate development, but it does not remove the need for judgement. The modeller still has to understand how an idea translates into a shoe. Materials still have to be selected and positioned. Prototypes still need to be corrected. A finished shoe still has to work on the foot and look right.

CERCAL, the district’s school

CERCAL — Centro Ricerca e Scuola Internazionale Calzaturiera — has been based in the district since 1984. Its role includes training in footwear and leather goods, from design and modelling to production and specialist manual work.

The school is part of a longer chain. The nineteenth-century shoemaker learned through practice. Later generations learned in workshops and family businesses. Today, some of the same disciplines are taught formally, alongside digital tools and contemporary production methods.

Specialist knowledge is fragile: some of it can be written down, and much of it cannot. A modeller develops judgement through repeated corrections. A cutter learns to recognise material behaviour through experience. A specialist supplier learns the requirements of a product through years of collaboration. When an experienced person retires, or a specialist workshop closes, that knowledge may be difficult to replace.

CERCAL provides one institutional route through which part of the district’s accumulated experience can continue to be taught and developed.

A district under pressure

San Mauro’s success has never insulated it from change. The district has adapted to war, mechanisation, tourism, internationalisation and the rise of fashion footwear. The pressures facing it today are different again.

In the first half of 2024, Intesa Sanpaolo recorded a 21.3% year-on-year decline in exports from the San Mauro Pascoli footwear district. At the same time, regional initiatives involving the municipality, CERCAL and other organisations have been examining the environmental impact of footwear production, footwear waste and the recovery of materials including leather waste.

The district now has to negotiate changing markets while retaining the specialised capabilities that accumulated over generations. That matters most in a sector where much of the expertise is held by small businesses and experienced individuals. When a specialist workshop closes, something more difficult to measure can disappear with it: a particular technique, a supplier relationship, or years of accumulated experience.

A shoe leaving San Mauro

A finished shoe made in San Mauro may travel thousands of kilometres before it reaches its wearer. By then, the town itself is likely to have disappeared from view.

What remains in the object is less obvious: the choices made during development, the specialists involved in its construction, the businesses that supplied its components and the experience accumulated in the district over generations.

The old deschetto is no longer at the centre of production. Its work is spread across the town: in the modeller’s workshop, in the cutting room, in the factory, in the specialist supplier, in the school where another generation learns how footwear is made.

San Mauro’s story began with people repairing and making shoes for their neighbours. Over time, that local trade became a network capable of producing for distant markets without losing its connection to the place where it began.

A shoe can carry the name of a fashion house. Its history may begin somewhere much smaller: in a town in Romagna where, for generations, making footwear became one of the ways people made a living.