Salvatore Ferragamo Partners With Pediatric Hospital Foundation

MILAN — Salvatore Ferragamo and the Foundation of the Anna Meyer Pediatric Hospital have formed a three-year partnership to promote scientific research and expand the Florence-based hospital.

As part of the agreement, the luxury fashion company, also based in Florence, has helped purchase a tandem mass spectrometer, a new machine to be used to diagnose rare diseases and to develop new techniques for scientific research into metabolic diseases.

Ferragamo will also support the clinical development of pediatric cardiology and the hospital’s expansion plan, which includes Health Center dedicated to daytime activities and child neuropsychiatry. As part of the partnership, Ferragamo will also collaborate on other charity initiatives, such as marathons run by employees.

The company is channeling a total of 1.5 million euros in the three years.

“Sustainability is an ambition that Salvatore Ferragamo has decided to embrace and undertake for future generations,” said Ferruccio Ferragamo, chairman of the company founded by his father Salvatore. “We are committed to putting social responsibility at the center of our decision-making process. At this singular time in history, in which all people — more than ever before — face significant threats to their health and well-being, it is our duty as a business to frame our work within the principles of solidarity and the creation of positive value, in order to protect and improve the community. This is why I am proud to have signed this three-year partnership with the Meyer Foundation, an icon of Florentine excellence that the city is honored to call its own.”

This partnership is in line with Ferragamo’s ongoing commitment to the territory. In 2019, after two years of works, the company unveiled the Fountain of Neptune in central Florence it had helped restore through an investment of 1.5 million euros. The company has financed other major restoration projects over the years, including the allegorical statues on Ponte Santa Trinita, in 1996; the Column of Justice in Piazza Santa Trinita, in 1998, and the eight rooms in the Uffizi Gallery, in 2015. In addition, it has established the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo at Palazzo Spini Feroni, headquarters of the brand.

In April, as the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic hit Italy, Ferragamo teamed with the Italian Red Cross to finance the renovation of two wards of Florence’s I Fraticini hospital, which was shut down in 1996. The two renovated wards were to host 60 patients who are recovering from the coronavirus or who needed to be in quarantine. This was only one of the initiatives endorsed by Ferragamo during the pandemic, as it created and donated 100,000 face masks and also provided Tuscan health-care institutions with 50,000 bottles of hand sanitizers and 3,000 respirator masks.

“The partnership and support that Salvatore Ferragamo SpA has chosen to offer the foundation enhances the company’s standing in Florence and throughout the country,” said Prof. Gianpaolo Donzelli, chairman of the Meyer Foundation. “Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that when Salvatore Ferragamo returned to Italy in 1927 at the age of 29, after working in the U.S. for 13 years, he opened his first true shoemaker’s workshop in Florence, just a few hundred meters from the Meyer hospital’s original location. Who knows how many times Salvatore, as he passed by the entrance, thought of the importance of teamwork in healing children’s diseases, just as teamwork was important in his life to accomplish the objectives that he had clearly pictured in his mind. We value this partnership for what it represents, and we would like to express our deepest gratitude to Salvatore Ferragamo.”

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