You may meet a well-spoken gentleman on the streets of Venice, or in a Midtown Manhattan café. This gentleman may talk about the long lost art of conversation; pocket squares and bespoke tailoring, always in impeccable Italian. This would be Franco Sarto himself.

Mr. Sarto easily understood that shoes and fashion were to be his life’s work. He was born in 1949 in Dolo, in the outskirts of Venice. An apprentice craftsman by age 14, Mr. Sarto sought work in a shoe factory where he sat on a stool, hand-lasting shoes with hammer and nail. By his early twenties, he moved to Stra—the epicenter of Italian shoe design— and opened a design studio. By 1990, he was able to launch his namesake line.