The Object
The shop is barely wider than a corridor. You step in off a stepped lane above the beach at Positano, and the man behind the bench looks at your feet before he looks at your face. This is the order of things here. The sandal comes first.
He does not reach for a box. He asks you to stand on a length of leather, marks the shape of the foot with a pencil, and cuts. You choose the straps from a wall of them, plain or studded, a single band across the instep or the fine spider web that fans across the toes. Then you wait, and it is not long. The sole is trimmed, the straps are threaded and stitched, the edges are worked smooth. Twenty minutes, give or take, and you walk out in them.
There is nothing precious about it, which is exactly why it feels like luxury. Nobody is selling you a story. They are selling you a sandal that fits.
The craft is older than the crowds. Positano was a working village of fishermen and their boats when, in the late 1950s, the outside world began to arrive. By the 1960s the local shoemakers had settled on the form we still recognise, a flat leather sandal cut close to the foot, and it travelled. Along the coast to Amalfi and Maiori, across the water to Capri, and then further, on the feet of women who could have bought anything. Jacqueline Kennedy wore them. So did Brigitte Bardot. The sandal did not change to suit them. They came to it.
What holds up is the honesty of the thing. Good Italian leather, stitched rather than glued where the maker can manage it, a sole shaped to one pair of feet and no other. Some of these workshops are three generations deep now, the grandson at the bench where the grandfather stood, cutting to the same unhurried rhythm. The prices are not cruel. You can leave with a pair for less than the cost of a good dinner.
We have a weakness for objects that refuse to perform, and this is one of them. No logo you would read from across a room. No season to it. You wear them until the leather gives, then you climb the lane again and have another pair cut. The value sits in the fit and the making, and both are done in front of you, which is more than most luxury will allow.
