03-08-2025
I flew to Florence to find my father's shoes
Just before my father died, he visited Mannina in Florence to have his feet measured for a pair of shoes. I'd found the handwritten receipt in his desk on thin yellow paper, stapled with small samples of leather. Online pictures of Mannina showed a glass-fronted shop of lacquered wood and brass, the name in beveled gold across the door. So after months without a holiday, I booked a cheap short haul flight from London to Italy, determined to track down these missing shoes.
My father had been a tailor for much of his life, the third man in Pakeman Catto & Carter, an established men's clothing shop in the Gloucestershire town of Cirencester. 'At one point he'd dressed half the gentlemen of England,' my uncle said at his funeral, which is probably not far from the truth. I remember when I was at school seeing the emerald flash of a teacher's coat (green linings were Pakemans house style) and another parent's dotted navy handkerchief, stitched with their belt and dragon insignia.
About a decade ago, Pakemans was bought out by Cordings. But my father always adored old-fashioned family-run establishments. When I was a teenager, he took me to get a pair of shoes at Ducker & Sons in Oxford, which shod J.R.R. Tolkien, Evelyn Waugh and Herbert Asquith. I remember him laughing and laughing with the man who ran the shop. Buying from such people was almost a civic duty. Duckers closed in 2016.
But Mannina is still going after more than 70 years. It's on the southern side of Florence's Ponte Vecchio, the famous bridge that's lined with small shops overlooking the River Arno, on the main street leading to the Pitti Palace. I explained to the kind woman at Mannina why I had come and she led me through the back corridors and into the workshop. As we entered, I had a rush of nostalgia. Low lamps hung from the ceiling, people sat at vice benches covered by newspaper, the workshop filled with the smell of glue and leather. I have foggy memories of being a child and taken to the room above Pakemans where tailors with tape measures around their necks cut lengths of cloth.
'Mr Carter,' a man in a frayed leather apron said, 'I'm very sorry to hear about your father.' He brought out a sketch of the shoes they had designed together and a pair of lasts. What a strange thing to see the shape of his feet – identical to the wooden shoe trees still in his bedroom in Gloucestershire. I didn't really know what to say. 'He had paid for the shoes but we never finished the measurements. We can either make a new pair for you or you can pick two pairs off the shelf.' It would be bad luck if I chose the custom pair and then also popped my clogs.
So we returned to the front of the building and I found myself hopping about the shop, trying on tasselled deerskin numbers and ornate perforated brogues. The owner, Antonio, was as Italian as you could imagine – floppy greying hair, immaculate cream chinos, a shirt collar that burst out from his lapels. 'From London, eh? You'll need something with a strong sole for all the rain!'
He smiled as he brought out boxes and told me that his father had died recently too. I realised who it was in the photographs hung between the shelves – the same floppy hair, but greyer, the kindly face of Signor Mannina Snr. As Antonio encouraged me to try on yet more shoes, I imagined what my father's advice would be: get one sober pair for work, the second can be more relaxed.
The first pair I chose were dark brown suede boots, all clean lines and perfect leather soles. The kind you could wear for a relaxed stroll up to the Pitti Palace for a Campari spritz. For the serious pair, I asked if Antonio had something in a slightly more English style, perhaps with rounded toes and without too much patterning (I have not inherited the same sense of sprezzatura as my Florentine friend). So we settled on simple Derbys with immaculately polished black toecaps and semi-rubber soles for that grim London weather. Antonio took the Derbys and bent them backwards, twisting the vamp to show me just how soft the leather was. They are, without a doubt, the most comfortable things I have ever put on my feet.
Two and a half years after my dad's death and 900 miles from Gloucestershire, I was handed a bag containing what are surely the finest shoes in all of Italy. As I was leaving, Antonio turned to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said 'thank you' – as though I had just done him some great favour rather than the other way around. There is nothing in this world more decent than a family-run business.
