Italian bootmaker Sam Vasta is crafting cowboy culture in the heart of the Flint Hills

You wouldn’t expect to find an Italian craftsman cobbling bespoke footwear in a Midwest city with a population under 2,500, but that is exactly what Sam Vasta is doing in Eureka, Kansas. However, Vasta will tell you that it was almost inevitable. “I don’t want to take any credit,” he says, “but I share a name with a very similar story.”

That story belongs to Salvatore “Sam” Lucchese, the Italian immigrant who learned shoemaking in the old country before landing in Texas in the 1880s and founding what would become one of America’s most legendary boot brands, the Lucchese Boot Company. Vasta’s path is almost identical: born in Italy, an apprenticeship in shoemaking, an ocean crossing and the name Salvatore, after his grandfather, who also went by Sam.

Growing up in Italy, Vasta’s impression of America came almost entirely from movies and comic books, particularly “Tex,” an Italian comic about a Texas ranger’s Wild West adventures. Vasta devoured the books as a kid. “Although I didn’t live in America, I was already kind of imbued with the West,” he says. “You die with your boots on, right? That’s the expression.”

After his family settled in New York, Vasta earned a master’s degree in history before an apprenticeship opportunity pulled him back to Italy to train as a shoemaker. When he brought the trade back to the states and set up shop in New York state, the market called for dress shoes. It wasn’t until later, after moves to Vermont and then to Kansas, that he found himself making the boots he’d always wanted to make.

How does one get from studying history books to making boots by hand? For Vasta, the craft was never purely practical. He sees objects like a pair of hand-stitched boots as a way of touching history directly in a way books can’t replicate. That inclination even led him to Civil War reenactments after he returned to the States, where he began handmaking historically accurate footwear for the era. “There are moments,” he says, “where you feel transported by imagining someone, back in the day, doing exactly the same thing with their hands.”

Like many Kansans, Vasta was unaware of the prominence of the Flint Hills in cowboy traditions. “I was amazed that of all the places I could have landed, this turned out to be about as cowboy as it gets,” Vasta says. “Texans will probably argue that.” He found out firsthand after selling a pair of boots to a member of the Hoy family, who are prominent ranchers near Emporia. He was handed a copy of a book by the late Jim Hoy, the Emporia State professor who spent decades chronicling Flint Hills cowboy culture. 

Ask Vasta why cowboy culture has traveled so far, from the Flint Hills to spaghetti Westerns to Kurosawa films, and he points to something simpler than nostalgia: individuality and self-reliance. It is the idea of the pioneer remaking himself in a new place. It’s not so different, he notes, from the swagger baked into Italian bespoke style—or from what every immigrant, cowboy or otherwise, has always had to do: reinvent themselves and start over. “If you were religious,” he says, “you could call it being born again.”

Vasta’s boots start at $3,000 and can run considerably higher, reflecting not just the hours to craft a single pair but the decades of training behind them. Calling the process “bespoke” doesn’t really do it justice. When someone buys a pair of custom boots from him, Vasta travels to the customer for a precise measurement of their feet. From there, he creates a mock-up of the boot to size and build his pattern upon. Then, he makes the boot. “I don’t work from old patterns,” Vasta says. “Each pair of boots are one of a kind.” The price may seem high, but in the range of expert bootmakers out there, Vasta resides in the lower-middle price band. Custom boots by masters such as Howard H. Knight run up to six figures, and Scott Wayne Emmerich makes $80,000 boots for folks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Reba McEntire and Kevin Costner. 

For a craftsman who has spent his career working on the same object, the price tag on a pair of his boots is really a price tag on a piece of history and tradition crafted in the heart of the Flint Hills.

For more information on Vasta and his work, visit bootmaker-samvasta.com.

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