Sentier Italia's Timeless Journey
How Roberta Segantin's Dolomites-based boot company carries us forward and back to the past
A couple years ago, I became entranced by a pair of shoes. The shoes, mountain boots handmade in the Italian Alps by a small company called Sentier, captured my imagination. Rugged and elegant with thoughtful details, they embodied for me a specific type of life spent outside. A life that celebrates adventure in beautiful places but also a certain close-to-home cosiness. A life that celebrates people who make things carefully by hand.
As I got to know the company through its Instagram, I realized that the vision of the life that I’ve been following is so vivid because it’s true. As Sentier’s founder Roberta Segantin told me during our recent conversation, the images that Sentier shares of her, her husband, Nicola, and their life in the Dolomites is “the real life that we are.”
Sentier’s story began 20 years ago as both a love story and a mystery. Roberta was back in her native Italy after several years working in NYC’s fashion industry, and she was going on a date with the man who would become her husband. When Nicola and his motorcycle arrived to pick up Roberta, accompanying him and his motorcycle were his brown mountain boots. “I just saw those boots and I was in love. I never saw something so real and so nice, and I wanted a pair for myself.”
I asked Roberta what was at the heart of her visceral reaction to the boots. Her response was similar to the feelings I had when I discovered them for the first time. “They gave me excitement,” she explained, a sense of adventure. But the boots also brought her back to the past: “My grandparents, they were Venetian, living in Venice, but they were in love with the mountains and were always there. They used to climb and I have a picture when my grandfather was younger and he was wearing those boots.”
The early days of Roberta and Nicola’s relationship included traveling to villages throughout the Dolomites in search of Nicola’s boots. To their surprise, no one was making that style anymore – “everything was a Gore Tex lightweight.”
Then in 2006, “after one year of research,” they found the bootmaker. “We found the artisan that made his [Nicola’s] boots. We knocked on his door, and I explained that I wanted a pair for me.”
But the artisan told them that his studio was not making the shoes anymore and that he no longer had access to the boot molds. Undeterred, Roberta gave him her phone number and shoe size, asking him to call her if he was able to track down a mold. 10 days later, he called. An original mold in her size had been found. Less than a month after that, Roberta had her own pair of the boots. It was then that she decided to bring the boots and their craftsmanship back to life.
With three boots as samples, she connected with a former colleague with a store in Cortina d’Ampezzo, who agreed to sell an initial flight. The first 20 pairs, for men and women, sold out immediately. The business continued as a side project for Roberta until 2018, when it became her full-time focus. “7 years ago, I started to really concentrate on it. I opened the website and the Instagram.” During COVID, and despite the global shutdown, the business grew significantly.
Roberta’s passion and perseverance has led the company to where it is today. The boots, known as Sentier’s “Pedule,” are made of high quality rubber, leather, iron, and cotton. There are nuances to their different styles, and you could easily get caught up, as I have, in debating amongst the different colors, hardware, and laces to choose from. Sentier has also expanded its offerings to include shoe collaborations and new items, such as Alpine Guides from Meredith Erickson.
While Nicola, a fireman, is not involved in the day-to-day business, he appears frequently on Sentier’s website and Instagram. I especially love the images of him and Roberta in Sentier’s velvet Friulane slippers, a nod to Roberta’s Venetian family. Whereas the boots embody the hardiness of the Alps, the Friulane slippers speak to their softness. I told Roberta how the velvet color options that she selected for the Friulanes capture the palette of the Alpine region in the same way that Harris Tweed reflects Scotland’s landscapes. “It’s true, the colors represent the nature: the forest with the oranges, reds, and yellow. The green with the land and the grass.”
While the slippers might seem like the obvious year ‘round shoe – to wear to the market in the summer and in the cabin after skiing in the winter – the Pedule boots are just as dynamic. Far from a fall/winter-only shoe, the boots are designed to be worn throughout the year, just as Roberta’s grandfather wore them. There is something really special and classic about this style for spring and summer. They can go for mountain walks but can also take you through the garden and New York’s rainy sidewalks. And if you have any doubt as to how chic the boots can be, look no further than actress Kelly Rutherford and her pair:
Although the shoes sell around the world and to clients as iconic as Kelly, it was Roberta’s first sale to a customer in NYC that is especially meaningful to her: “it was a big, big, big emotion to receive an order online from New York. I consider New York my second home, because I lived there for a long time. I had so much fun. It made me. And when I saw my first order online from New York, I was like, Oh, my God! My boots in New York!”
Today the U.S. is her second biggest market, with orders shipped to Telluride, Denver, and, of course, NYC.
Who is the typical Sentier customer? Roberta explained that while it might seem like a niche group who seeks out this type of style and craftsmanship, there is a lot of diversity. “Between 35 and 55 years old are my top customers. They are different people but absolutely mountain people.” Are her customers buying the boots for the same emotional connection that first captured Roberta?
“They tell me the boots remind them of when they were kids and they were wearing those little boots from their mother and father … going to the mountain with the leather shorts – you know this look typical for the mountain – especially on the Dolomites: a leather short, shirt with a little flower embroidered, and the little boots.”
Does she wish that her grandparents, for whom the Italian peaks were so important, could see what she’s created with Sentier? “To represent this style knowing the family history, it's another emotion. It's something that really touches me. I would like to have them here to show what I'm doing.”
