History

Salvatore Ferragamo was born in 1898 in Bonito, near Avellino in Campania, the eleventh of fourteen children of a sharecropping family. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker at nine and emigrated to the United States in 1914 at sixteen, joining brothers already working in Boston. He moved to California in 1923 after the film studios there became his primary clients: Cecil B. DeMille commissioned shoes for his biblical epics, and Ferragamo's designs appeared in The Ten Commandments, The Thief of Bagdad, and dozens of other films before he had turned 25.

Ferragamo returned to Italy in 1927, establishing his production in Florence to access the skilled artisans of the city's leather trade. He studied anatomy at the University of Florence to understand the architecture of the foot — the first couturier shoemaker to apply scientific study to comfort as rigorously as to aesthetics — and patented numerous innovations: the steel arch support (1929), the cork-platform sole (1937, which created the wedge heel as a category), the invisible sandal with nylon thread (1947), the cage heel (1955). The list of clients continued throughout: Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe (the museum holds the red stilettos she wore in the Some Like It Hot era), Sophia Loren, the Duchess of Windsor.

Salvatore died in 1960, leaving the company to his wife Wanda and six children. The museum was established by the family in 1995 to preserve and exhibit the archive of the 14,000 shoe models Salvatore had created — a figure that represents less than one-tenth of the total production documented in the company's records.