SHOE DREAMS.(Italian shoemaker Diego Della Valle)(Interview)

Casette d'Ete, a town in the Italian province of Le Marche, has been a center of shoemaking in Italy for almost a century. There are thousands of shoe manufacturers in the region, mostly small factories employing about a hundred people each, producing every variety of footwear imaginable, from high heels to hiking boots. Many residential garages and basements are also devoted to shoemaking. Fifty thousand people make shoes in Le Marche, but jobs are rapidly declining, as manufacturing moves to Eastern Europe and China.

I first visited Casette d'Ete last fall, during a day of thick fog. I was expecting to find charming streets lined with cobblers, cheerfully pounding nails into soles, but all I could see through the gloom was boxy industrial spaces, whose exteriors revealed nothing of what went on inside. Then, out of the fog, emerged a two-story white marble palazzo. This was the main plant for Tod's, an Italian company that Americans assume is British and that the British think is American. It is one of the largest luxury-shoe factories in the world, producing fifteen thousand pairs a day. On a small hill nearby, I could just make out the tower of what used to be a medieval granary and is now the vent of an indoor swimming pool in the home of Diego Della Valle, the founder of Tod's and the king of the Marchigiano shoemakers.

The smell of newly tanned leather permeated the interior of the factory. It was especially powerful in the huge storeroom, where thousands of rolls of cowhide, snakeskin, and crocodile, in brown, black, pink, purple, and green, were piled on shelves. There was ten million dollars' worth of leather, enough to produce a year's worth of shoes without resupplying. The factory was vast, and yet the scale didn't seem industrial; it felt like a four-hundred-thousand-square-foot cobbler's shop. In the main room there were two hundred and eighteen workstations. Many of the employees are the sons and daughters of people who worked for Dorino Della Valle, Diego's father. They were moving parts of shoes on wheeled carts from one station to the next, to be cut, sewn, stretched, painted, trimmed, polished, and boxed. Once a left and a right shoe had been cut from a piece of hide, the two shoes stayed together throughout the line, so that at the end the grain and color of the pair would match. Overseers intercepted flawed pieces along the way, and at the end of the line the shoes had to pass through a gantlet of inspectors before they were placed in orange Tod's boxes and dispatched to one of Tod's hundred and twenty-nine retail outlets around the world.

If Della Valle's private airplane is on the runway at the Ancona airport, it means he is in residence at the factory. If the plane isn't there, then he is probably off tending to some aspect of his far-flung empire of leather--overseeing the people who inspect herds of cattle in Argentina, to make sure the hide on their haunches is thick enough for his purposes, or who descend into unlit caves in France, where the company's distinctive caramel-colored "natural" leather is tanned, or who arrange for Michael Douglas to have a very special pair of Tod's loafers or Julia Roberts to have a Tod's bag. It's easy to spot the Tod's airplane, because the license plate has Della Valle's initials on it. Inside, the seats are covered in caramel leather.

On the day I visited Casette d'Ete, Della Valle was at the center of a dozen people in a conference room, with handbags and shoeboxes strewn on the floor around them, slowly massaging a leather handbag. He has longish hair, a boyish face, a compact build, and very mobile eyebrows. He claims to be fifty, although in Italy a man may be fifty until his sixtieth birthday. Unlike the heads of most other European luxury-goods houses, with their sober manners and Old World hauteur, he is jocular and accessible; he'll take your hand in both of his when he shakes it, and touch the back of it in the same probing way he feels leather, and tell you a joke. He has the humility and plainspokenness of someone who is neither humble nor plain but is too sure of himself to pretend to be more than a very clever scarparo, a cobbler. He seems to be both a man of the world and a ragazzo del bar--the amico you meet at the coffee bar on the corner to discuss soccer, women, or Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's recent face-lift. In public, he is almost never alone; he often travels with a coterie of male buddies, among whom are Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the head of Ferrari, and Paolo Borgomanero, a businessman and investor.

Today, Della ...