Salvatore Ferragammo had Hollywood wooed and shoed with an artistry that keeps competitors hot on his heels...

Although Salvatore Ferragamo made literally thousands of pairs of shoes in his lifetime, his first two were perhaps the most significant. Barely nine years old, the eleventh child of a family of fourteen brothers and sisters, Salvatore was so taken by the plight of his mother in not being able to provide new shoes for his sister Giuseppina's First Communion, that he collected scraps of discarded white canvas, cardboard tacks, two small lasts and some glue from the local cobbler and made up two pairs of shoes overnight.

Hardly the most auspicious beginning for a man who would go on to shoe the feet of people of the calibre of Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, and the members of most of the Royal Households of Europe, but of sufficient impact to convince his parents Antonio and Mariantonia, to let him be apprenticed to be village cobbler, Luigi Festa.

In his autobiography aptly titled Shoemaker of Dreams, Salvatore Ferragamo attributes this episode in his early life to beginning his life-long search for the realisation of a personal dream.

"My father was a man of vision", says one of his three daughters Fulvia. "He knew from an early age that what he wanted from his life was to produce the very best shoes he could. But not just shoes; more works of art for feet. Even as a boy in his native town of Bonito my father had a passion for shoe-making. His earliest dreams were to make shoes that were the best fitting in the world".