Rome · Monti · 2012 to 2025
SUEDE STORE is now closed,but SUEDE isn't.
The first sneaker store in Rome, told in order: how it started, what it became, and what is left of it.
2012
Via dei Serpenti, Rione Monti, Rome
The first sneaker store in Rome opens in Monti.
A small white room on Via dei Serpenti, a few blocks from the Colosseum. Wooden shelves, pallets, sneakers framed on the wall like pictures, and a fish tank with a Nike Dunk inside it.
Rome had luxury, Rome had fast fashion, Rome had nothing in between for anyone who cared about this. The model was not another shop. It was Colette in Paris: a room where product, print, music and people were the same conversation.
2013
Hypebeast
One year in, the biggest streetwear publication in the world calls Rome.
Hypebeast ran a full interview with the founder of a shop that had been open for twelve months, in a country the sneaker world was not looking at.
2014
Highsnobiety
A t-shirt that says ROME ends up in a global gift guide.
Not a paid placement and not a press release. An editor at a Berlin-born title read worldwide picked a SUEDE product and put it next to nineteen others, because it was good.
2016
The second room · Via degli Zingari 58, Rome
A room brands could take over.
The shop outgrew the first room and moved one street away, because the neighbourhood was half the point.
The second space was built for something the first one could not do: be handed over to a brand and rebuilt around it. Walls, colour, light, furniture. Not a window display with a logo in it, the whole room.
In March 2016 Diadora launched its worldwide Make it Bright campaign and turned Via degli Zingari into the first and only Bright Store in Italy. Teal walls, blue drapes, the N9000 with its 3M glow in the dark panels, and a queue down the street.
2017
The first run club in Rome
A sneaker store that made people actually run.
SUEDE started the first run club in Rome: a shop full of running shoes that got people out of the door and onto the street, instead of selling them something to look at.
The room
2014 to 2018
The shop stopped being a shop.
Camp outs, with people sleeping on the pavement for a release. Release parties. Pop ups. Photo exhibitions, book signings, DJ sets. Raffles that people travelled for.
Musicians, illustrators and photographers started treating the place as a room to be in rather than a place to buy from. Luca Barcellona brought his calligraphy. Daniele Tozzi hung a show called Fight 'Till Death. IL TRE appeared in the SS19 editorial. SUEDE interviewed Mike Cherman of Chinatown Market rather than waiting to be interviewed.
A store sells you something. A room gives you somewhere to be.
2019
December · Via Cavour, Rome
Seven years of experience turned into one room.
One hundred square metres on Via Cavour, still in Monti. Walls covered in travertine, the stone you only find in and around Rome, so that a sneaker store would look like the city it was in and not like every other sneaker store on earth.
The opening night filled the street. Inside: adidas Consortium, New Balance, CP Company, Soulland, Medicom Toy. On the door, the same hexagon from 2012.
Eight months later Sneaker Freaker put the room in front of its own audience: "A beautiful store in a beautiful city."
- The accounts
- adidas Consortium · adidas YEEZY · asics Friends & Family · Converse Incubate · Nike NBHD
- The room
- 100 sqm, Roman travertine walls
- Also carried
- New Balance · CP Company · Soulland · Medicom Toy
2025
The end of the shop
After thirteen years, the physical store closed.
Thirteen years, three rooms, one city that did not have any of this before and then did.
The shop is closed. The archive is open.
Now
What this site is
An archive, kept on purpose.
Everything that came through SUEDE between 2012 and 2025 is documented here: the drops, the releases, the writing. None of it is for sale.
We kept it because nobody else did. Almost everything that mattered in Italian sneaker culture in those years passed through a handful of rooms, and most of those rooms kept no record. This one did.
Fabrizio De Lucia now works with brands through EDEUS Studio. This is not a portfolio. It is the record.