The train from Milan slows into Parma just as the morning fog is lifting off the Po Valley — the same low, silvery mist that ages the region's famous hams and cheeses in nearby cellars. It's easy to forget, stepping off the platform, that this quiet city known for Parmesan and Prosciutto is also home to one of Italy's most respected belt makers. But leather, it turns out, belongs to the same family of Parma traditions as food: patience, climate, and generations of stubborn craft.

Anderson's workshop doesn't announce itself with glass and signage. It sits modestly among the streets of Parma, the way a family business that has never needed to shout about itself often does. Inside, though, the scale of what happens here becomes clear fast — leather in every stage of transformation, from raw hides to belts nearly ready for a customer's wardrobe in London, Tokyo, or New York.

The company was founded in 1966 by Carlo Valenti, who came from a long line of Parma leatherworkers. He had a particular fondness for English tailoring, and named his new venture after Anderson & Sheppard, the storied Savile Row tailor he admired — which explains why a proudly Italian company carries a name that sounds like it wandered in from London. Today his son, Riccardo Valenti, runs the company, and by all accounts is as consumed by the details of the craft as his father was. He's known to spend the better part of his day on quality control alone — checking leather selection, inspecting cuts, catching the imperfections that would ruin a belt before it's even assembled — all while also steering the brand's presence in more than 80 countries worldwide.

Ask anyone in menswear circles what Anderson's means, and the answer usually comes back to two things. First, the woven belt — the brand's iconic multicolour stretch design that became a runaway signature in the late 1980s, transforming the company from a quiet regional factory into an internationally recognised name. Second, an old-school devotion to technique: vegetable tanning, hand-tooled saddle leather, suede, nappa, and exotic skins, all still finished by hand in the same Parma workshop where it began nearly sixty years ago.

What's striking, watching the process up close, is how unhurried it all is. A single leather belt isn't one piece of hide — it's three layers, glued together, each cut so its properties match precisely, often from the very same piece of leather. Softer, more delicate skins demand a completely different touch than a leather with visible grain, which is more forgiving to work.

Once those layers are bonded, the belt is left to rest for five to seven days before anything else happens to it. Then comes a sequence of finishing rounds — three of them, spaced roughly a week apart — designed to seal the layers so seamlessly that, in the finished belt, they're invisible. What looks like a single strip of leather is, in truth, a small feat of lamination and patience. Across the whole process, a belt passes through around 100 individual steps before it's ready to leave the building.