Designer shoes from Taormina.

I hired Roots in the Boot to research my family roots in Scigliano (Calabria), and learned that I come from a long line of shoemakers!! Every Gualtieri ancestor of my great-grandmother, Josephine, was a shoemaker–back as far as Pasquale Gualtieri, born about 1725.

Could my great-great grandfather’s shoe shop have looked like this Sicilian one? Image from Wikimedia Commons.

I would love to see a pair of their shoes, and I wonder what their shoemaking shop looked like. As I roam around Scigliano later this summer, I will be looking for shoe shops, and hope my Italian cousins there can tell me more about our shoe-making ancestors.

Several of the women in the family were cotton or silk spinners. I imagine this as “cottage” employment rather than work outside the home, but honestly, I don’t know. The villages that make up Scigliano are fairly small, but I don’t know much in detail about their history. Could there have been a weaving business there, turning their silk into luxurious velvets and brocades?

Could it be that at some point they combined their efforts, and made shoes like these?

Woman’s silk brocade shoes, 1770s, probably Italian. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Do you know the occupation of your Italian ancestors?