Madova

Madova was founded in 1919 by Amedeo Donnini, whose small Florence workshop made leather gloves for the city's prominent families and shops. Production stopped during the economic crisis and the Second World War, and the business did not reopen until 1945, when Amedeo's children — Ennio, Sergio, Rosanna and Maria — revived it and, in 1954, opened the retail shop and registered the Madova trademark that carries the family name to this day.

The shop sits on Via Guicciardini, the street that runs directly to the Ponte Vecchio, and the family describes itself as one of the only glovemakers left in Europe that both sells and produces exclusively leather gloves rather than diversifying into other accessories. That single-material focus has defined the house across its history: cutting, lining and finishing are done in-house, and customers are still fitted by hand at the counter rather than choosing by size chart alone.

Madova is now run by a fourth generation — Mauro, Franco, Andrea and Silvia — who have kept the workshop's original scope: leather gloves in a wide range of colors and linings, exported to the United States, Europe and Japan. Over a century after Amedeo Donnini's founding, the business remains what it started as: a single-family, single-product glove shop a few steps from one of Florence's most photographed bridges.