The Italian steamship Stampalia seemed enormous to the small dark boy hailing from Bonito, but that didn’t scare him: it seemed only fitting that the vessel was almost as big as his dreams. It was 1915, Salvatore was not 17 yet, and he had only 150 liras in his pocket — about $30. With a suitcase full of his mother’s cooking and a head filled with hope, he looked forward to his future. He wanted to make shoes, and America, vast and new, seemed like the right place to go.

Salvatore’s love affair with shoes had started many years before, when he was still a small child. His mother knew that he could always be found in Luigi Festa’s workshop, fascinated as he was by the local cobbler’s ability to craft shoes. Barefoot, curious, and barely able to walk, he already knew with startling clarity that one day he would be a shoemaker — the best of all.