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Where craft, tradition, and time transform raw hides into heirlooms.
If you close your eyes inside a Tuscan tannery, the air itself begins to speak.
It carries the warmth of bark and earth, the faint metallic tang of tools, the quiet hiss of water running across stone floors. Sunlight falls through high windows, striking dust that drifts above great wooden drums, each one turning at its own patient rhythm.
This is no place for haste. Here, time is measured not in hours but in seasons. Vegetable tanning in this corner of Italy is not merely a method; it is heritage itself, passed hand to hand, master to apprentice, as carefully as a recipe that binds families together.
For those who seek leather worth carrying a lifetime, it begins here in patience, in ritual, in a craft that refuses to be rushed.
It is a process of weeks, sometimes months, fibres drinking deeply from nature until they carry its strength within them. The result is leather that breathes, biodegrades, and lives with a character as unrepeatable as the tree it came from.
Chrome tanning, by contrast, is a child of industry. Over 90% of the world’s leather is treated this way: hides immersed in chemical baths that can finish the job in days. Swift, yes, but at a cost. Natural textures are stripped away, replaced with synthetic facades that shine briefly before cracking, peeling, or stiffening into silence.
Vegetable-tanned leather chooses a slower truth. It grows more supple with every season, gathering patina, depth, and dignity as it walks beside you.
The roots of vegetable tanning in Italy run deeper than stone. The Etruscans, long before Rome, tanned hides with bark and leaves. Over centuries, Tuscan towns became sanctuaries of this craft, their tanneries built along rivers that carried both water and memory.
Some of those tanneries endure still, family-run, their knowledge refined like a manuscript read for generations. The tools may have changed, but the reverence has not: every hide respected, every gesture measured, every outcome meant to last longer than the hands that made it.
Step into one, and you are stepping not into the past, but into a lineage loyal not to nostalgia, but to a way of making that has proven itself against centuries.
1. Selection of Hides
Every story begins with a hide, not raised for fashion, but as a by-product of the food industry. The finest are chosen: strong in fibre, free of deep scars, carrying just enough marks to remind you of where it came from.
2. Soaking and Preparation
The hides are bathed in water, the salts washed away, the fibres revived. This is the breath before the craft, a quiet readiness to take in what’s to come.
3. Tanning in Drums
Wooden drums turn at their unhurried rhythm, filled with water and natural tannins. Slowly, patiently, the hides drink in the essence of bark and leaf until strength and suppleness seep deep into their grain.
4. Drying and Resting
After tanning, the hides are left to rest in airy halls. No rushing heat, no harsh machines, just time and space. It is here they gather resilience, flexibility, and quiet strength.
5. Hand-Dyeing, The Signature Touch
Unlike leather dyed in vats, these hides are coloured by hand. Layer after layer, artisans press pigment into the grain with cloths or sponges, blending tone with tone. The colours do not cover the leather; they converse with it.
No two hides are ever the same. Their subtle variations in shade are not flaws but signatures, living proof that your piece is the only one of its kind.
6. Conditioning and Finishing
Oils and natural waxes are rubbed in, revealing either a soft glow or a velvety matte, depending on the finish chosen. Only then is the leather ready for its second life: to be cut, shaped, and carried into yours.
Vegetable tanning may be slower, more deliberate, but its touch on the planet is gentler, more enduring.
At Republic of Florence, we choose tanneries that honour vegetable tanning not as a process, but as a philosophy. Every hide is respected, not stripped of its story. Its marks remain quiet reminders that nature was here first.
Every bag we make carries this forward: a lineage of craft, patience, and permanence. It is not nostalgia, but continuity, a living tradition built to last beyond its maker.
