Amazing shoes of Turin

Bartolomeo Cavallera, born in 1898, opened his workshop in Turin in Via San Francesco d'Assisi 26, just after the end of World War I. In 1935, his shoes already accompanied the fashion shows at Valentino’s Castle, but it was after World War II he made his own fortune. The shop moved to Via Pietro Micca 17 and Cavallera associated his name to the great Turin and Italian fashion. In 1948, his shoes were on the catwalk at Palazzo Madama’s gala along with Ferragamo’s. The following year, they were at Lido di Venezia, with Schubert's clothes and Rivella furs. Ava Gardner wore a special Cavallera creation for the film "The Barefoot Contessa", in 1954. Creative, Cavallera elaborated models and original decoration techniques, such as leather processing in dense colored stitching that create refined shaded effects. This technique was taken up and developed by Aldo Sacchetti, who was sold the workshop and the store by Cavallera in the second half of the 60s.

Aldo Sacchetti, born in 1922, began working in his father's shoemaker's shop and opened his own in Via Arsenale, Turin, in 1948. He entered the fashion world since the early fifties, with runway shows of young labels organized by Anna Vanner at Teatro Carignano. Soon the Alta Moda realized how talented he was and he started his collaboration with great Italian maisons for Florence and Rome’s catwalks. Outstanding inventor, Sacchetti invented new shoes models: the ballerina flats, profiled with elastic band, is his. He sold the patent to an American manufacturer. In the ‘60s, he invented a shoe made only of heel, for the designer Jacques Esterel, and one soles and heels, to better highlight the colored socks in fashion shows at Palazzo Pitti. Sacchetti conception combineed great technical skills and knowledge of materials. His mosaic-processed leathers is famous, jewel-studded shoes with rhinestones, crossed by ribs of gold and silver, produces in a traditional way with a few, experienced workers. When he took over the activity of Bartolomeo Cavallera and moved to Via Pietro Micca, at the end of the ‘60s, he had over two thousand forms in hornbeam wood, including those for Maria Callas, Audrey Hepburn, Queen Elizabeth. Aldo Sacchetti closed his workshop in 1993 and donated his works to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and to the Vigevano Museum of Footwear.