VERONA, Italy — In a country famed for its fine leather
products and fashion sense, shining shoes was never a particularly
exalted profession.
The practice was imported during World War II, when
American and British soldiers paid young boys on the street to buff
up their boots, sometimes in return for chocolate and
cigarettes.
Even one of the ways to call it — “ssiucia,” as
described in Vittorio De Sica’s 1946 movie of the same name — comes
from the Neapolitan dialect that imitates the sound of the English
“shoeshine.”
And it was certainly never a woman’s job.
But don’t tell any of that to Eleonora Lovo. She is the
latest example of how women have moved into the decidedly
out-of-fashion trade, once exclusively the domain of men, and even
made it hip.
Today the 43-year-old Ms. Lovo walks around Verona in
black men’s shoes, a stretchy below-the knee skirt, a white shirt
and ample, black oval eyeglasses. From her forearm hangs a
rectangular brown leather bag full of attentively polished shoes,
which she picks up and returns to clients herself.
Ms. Lovo’s laboratory is a corner of her family’s
living room. Sitting on a wooden chair on a recent day, surrounded
by art books, beeswax, colored cream polishes, all sorts of brushes
and a cuckoo clock, she started brushing off the dust and dirt from
one of her “babies,” and described the work that is her
passion.
“I don’t think it’s a job for men only,” Ms. Lovo said.
“I have always loved men’s shoes. They have a history, for the
models, the ways they are sewed together. Women’s shoes simply
don’t.”
The second woman in Italy to gain renown for choosing
the job in recent years, Ms. Lovo began her business out of her
home, and at several business congresses, hotels and shoe fairs, in
2014. From there her reputation spread.
But before she started, she learned the art and craft
of treating leather from books and at a local tannery, and started
polishing shoes for her family and friends.
“While I was learning, I once ruined a friend’s fine
shoes,” she recalled with anguish. “I couldn’t sleep that
night.”
“My challenge is to give them a new life,” she added,
smiling, while cleaning a pair of decade-old brown American shoes
with a blue microfiber cloth soaked in a delicate liquid detergent.
“My favorite thing about my job is to see my customers’ faces when
they unpack their polished shoes.”
While she polishes mostly men’s shoes, Ms. Lovo owes
her success mostly to women, she conceded.
On one hand, she has taken the place of the traditional
Italian housewife, whose chores included cleaning shoes. Now most
women work outside the home and no longer have the time for the
task.
On the other hand, her very first promoters were her
fellow soccer moms.
“Some moms first asked me to clean their leather bags,
and then they spread the word,” she said, explaining that women are
also her principal promoters on social media. “Men, in turn, trust
women for these kinds of jobs. For them, it’s like entrusting their
shoes to their mothers or girlfriends.”
Ms. Lovo is not Italy’s first shoeshine woman. In 2000,
another female entrepreneur, Rosalina Dallago, 51, opened a
shoeshine shop in Rome’s city center.
A former model and later a restaurateur, Ms. Dallago
has gently brushed the shoes of Italy’s elites, including the actor
Alberto Sordi and assorted politicians.
Her tiny, narrow shop, she likes to say, is nested
between the “sacred” — the San Lorenzo in Lucina church — and the
“profane” — the lower house of Parliament.
“You know, when I took over his shop, the 72-year-old
owner gave me his brushes,” Ms. Dallago said, gently passing wooden
brushes made of horsehair. “It was a real baton passing. I felt
like crying.”
In 16 years, Ms. Dallago’s career rapidly expanded. She
has run a shoeshine corner inside Fiumicino airport, and another in
a Roman club; had a 12-minute national television program; and held
entrepreneurship courses for women. She collaborates with a female
cobbler. All of her enterprises are managed by women.
Her business, portrayed as a glamorous and sexy new way
of shoe-shining, made headlines in publications all over the world,
from Germany to Japan.
Eleonora
Lovo, is the second woman in Italy to gain notoriety for choosing
the job in recent years. “I don’t think it’s a job for men only,”
Ms. Lovo said. “I have always loved men’s shoes. They have a
history, for the models, the ways they are sewed together. Women’s
shoes simply don’t.”
Her fame, however, still did not generate much
competition until Ms. Lovo came along, 500 kilometers, or about 310
miles, to the north.
“It’s a job that makes your hands dirty, and stay bent
all day long,” Ms. Dallago said with a smirk. “Not many women, and
people in general, like it.”
Traditionally, shoe-shining is considered a humble job
in Italy, one not in demand for decades. Its ranks grew even
thinner in recent years.
While it is common to see shoe-shiners at international
airports or in shopping areas in the United States or Britain, a
city like Rome had fewer than 10 shoe-shiners even in the golden
era of the 1950s. And all of them were men.
“It was a historically men-dominated job — only now
things are changing a bit,” said Tommaso Cancellara, the chief
executive at Micam, Italy’s main shoe fair.
Mr. Cancellara said that although shoe-shining was
still considered a humble job and clients could be somewhat haughty
in Italy, the use of professional shoe cream polishes was on the
rise. Stores offering a barbershop, shoe-shining service and shirt
shopping all together have opened since 2014 in cities around
Italy.
“That to me suggests that Italians are fed up with the
crisis, and at least enjoy a moment of personal joy,” he said,
adding that men no longer spend much money on holidays or clothing,
but they do treat themselves a bit.
“They have their shoes professionally shined and go to
the barber’s shop,” Mr. Cancellara explained. “I doubt any man
complains it’s a woman attending his shoes.”
Being a woman in the profession, Ms. Lovo and Ms.
Dallago agree, can indeed be an advantage. The latter recounted
flowers or Cartier boxes she had rejected through the years, but
she said none ever made her feel like the “Mata Hari of the year
2000.”
Ms. Lovo has a different attitude.
“I am a gentleman woman,” Ms. Lovo said, smiling under
her salt-and-pepper disheveled bob. “I can’t see well-dressed men
walking in dirty shoes. That’s simply why I started polishing
shoes.”