Women Try to Make Italy’s Shoe-Shining as Chic as Its Shoes

Women Try to Make Italy’s Shoe-Shining as Chic as Its Shoes

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 — “sciuscià,” 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.

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.”