Santoni was founded in 1975 in Corridonia, in the heart of the shoemaking district of the Marche region of Italy. Starting as a high quality footwear atelier, within 40 years it had become a leading global luxury brand, lead today by the founder’s son Giuseppe Santoni, who marries his father’s passion for the craft with an international vision. The Santoni creations come to life through superb techniques that are handed down by a generation of craftsmen to the next.

There are more than 400 hundred shoemakers working today in the Corridonia ateliers. The older artisans, employed by the company since its inception, have the task of training the younger generation the complex skills such as hand cutting, hand stitching and hand colouring. Santoni colours are obtained through a special technique, refined over time by the Santoni artisans, called velatura: a peculiar manual shoe colouring which results in dense, rich and pictorial shades of colour.