Our story
SUR was born from the union between a passion for tango and a deep knowledge of footwear production .
SUR is the result of an inspiration, a discovery, a personal growth and not just a commercial idea.
I started dancing tango, when there was nothing else in Florence, in 1995, at a dance school in the center. Alessandra Tedeschi and her partner taught there, who in turn took lessons from Annalisa Di Luzio and Tobias Bert from Bologna. When I climbed the ancient stone stairs of that patrician palace for the first time, immersed in semi-darkness with Gardel's music guiding me to the room where the lesson was held, I thought I was in the right place at the right time in my life. A heartbreaking love affair with this music and all the culture it is part of began, which still hasn't abandoned me.
In those years, there were almost no milongas or even specific tango shoes, but since my mother had a shoe company, created by her grandfather in the immediate post-war period, I began to produce my own shoes by hand, they were the first SUR, but I didn't know it yet. Silk, embroidery, slightly deco models, leathers chosen with extreme care among the softest and most precious, color combinations, my personal laboratory was enriched every day by the suggestions that tango music continually evoked in me. Whenever I could, I hid in that corner of the factory and dreamed of creating my own tango shoes.
Within 5 years, tango in Florence exploded. I continued to make tango shoes to my taste; I made them for myself and for friends who asked for them, since, with the exception of a few beautiful pairs of Argentine shoes that appeared sporadically and in some milongas, there were no real tango shoes in Italy.
The SUR company was officially founded in 2000, with a collection of already very detailed models and its unmistakable comfortable structure, which has characterized our brand since the beginning. The famous insole in ANTISHOCK material. To create this small artisan company I participated in a call for tenders issued by the Tuscany Region, which awarded the idea and encouraged its start up.
To the first models were added many others, all original . Each model has a woman's name, real women, imagined women, strong and strong-willed or sweetly sensual, disruptive and free, or mysterious and elusive.
The name SUR is undoubtedly inspired by the SOUTH of the world, by its warm and enveloping atmospheres, by the famous letra, by nostalgia, and by a historic place where Tango is danced, but it also recalls the world of high culture, the literary magazine SUR, founded by a great woman, Victoria Ocampo in Argentina, in which writers of the calibre of Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, José Bianco, Waldo Frank, Walter Gropius, Alfonso Reyes Ochoa, José Ortega y Gasset, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Octavio Paz, Jules Supervielle, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Eduardo Mallea, Ernesto Sabato, Federico García Lorca, Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda and many others have written.
A very evocative name, short but with its own intensity of meaning, in line with the product and its mood. These shoes also want to evoke a lost world, an atmosphere and at the same time be in step with the times in the aesthetic research and in the representation of an elegant but also courageous, intelligent and independent femininity.
Beatrice Raveggi