OUR STORY
AN ITALIAN COMPANY WITH ARTISAN PRODUCTION SINCE 1946
Since 1946, Calzaturificio Ziviani has specialized in “California” manufacturing , handcrafting sandals and comfortable shoes with soft leathers and removable insoles.
The company has a long experience behind it; it was born before the last war from an intuition of Pietro Ziviani who had gained good fame by making comfortable clogs for men and women.
Today the owners Cesare and Massimo Ziviani, maintaining the traditional commitment , seek modernity combined with elegance and comfort in the models.
All models are made entirely in their factory using specialized labor and taking care of every little detail.
The strong point is represented above all by the quality of the product which includes the choice of first-rate materials and original accessories.
THEY SAY ABOUT US
Would you like, even just once, to put on (better,) slippers? Nice to look at, soft in shape, practical to wear... padded with latex, lined with leather, machine-sewn... assembled by hand ... Satisfied, now? Initially, however, rather than the cozy slippers, sturdy wooden clogs were available, rather than the salesman, the owner of the company was available: Pietro Ziviani, Bruno and Cesare's father, who in San Michele Extra got behind the wheel of a very Italian Topolino... to deliver the goods and collect other commissions in the shops of Trentino. ... Since there were no more boots, Pietro Ziviani even sold wooden clogs to the German soldiers who guarded the fortifications on the outskirts of Verona. "The military, first of all, paid and paid with vouchers rather than with cannons", says Cesare Ziviani who today, after his brother Bruno retired in 2001, runs the company with his children Massimo, Monica and Laura. In 1961, Pietro Ziviani returned to San Martino Buon Albergo where he had left in 1936 to become an entrepreneur after having been a shoe factory worker. In the factory in via Cesare Abba, where it still is today, he had 30 employees. Leather slippers surprisingly took the place of wooden clogs again in Trentino, where wool house slippers already warmed the feet in cold rooms where there was no stube. But it was in Naples that orders for leather slippers ... reached 1,000 pairs ... The Ziviani family lived off that business until the fabric slippers arrived from China in the 1970s. The artisanal company could not cope with the oriental industry, so it turned its attention no longer to the graces of leather slippers, but to the Spartan, albeit leather, sandals. In the nineties, it supplied the last large quantities of leather slippers to the United Arab Emirates, who already had babouches, and to the New Yorkers of 5th Avenue, who already wore Native American moccasins... The craftsmen of the Ziviani family still make some leather slippers in the intervals between the manufacturing - called California - of one sandal and the other. Leather slippers for men, leather sandals for women... The Velcro fastening and opening applied by the Ziviani family made and makes the difference, even in Germany, where they consume as many sandals as Italians do pizza. Pleasant in appearance, comfortable to the touch, elastic in their bearing for 80 years (almost), because the Ziviani family has been registered with the Chamber of Commerce for 80 years. They may not be pin-up shoes, but they'll at least ease back pain.