Stefano Pisani died on October 11, 2018. He was 86. He had still been coming into the workshop two mornings a week, sitting on the same stool by the cutting bench, sharpening Marco's edgers and quietly correcting any belt that did not measure up. He was the keeper of the standard. The standard, more than the hands, was the workshop.

"I lost my father," Marco says, "and for the first time in my life, the door at six in the morning opened to an empty bench across from mine. I did not know what to do with the silence. 40 years of his voice in that room, and then nothing."

For 6 months, Marco stopped taking orders. His wife Giulia brought lunch to the workshop and found him sitting at Stefano's bench, hands flat on the wood, not working. His sister Anna offered to fly in from Milan, hire help, anything. Marco refused all of it. He did not want a different bench. He did not want a different rhythm.

Then one Tuesday in April, Giulia walked over with the morning coffee and found her husband at his own bench, awl in hand, stitching the saddle seam of a belt that had been cut 6 months earlier and left on the rack. He did not look up. He worked until the noon bells from the Volterra cathedral rang across the piazza.

When he finally spoke, he told Giulia what he later told his own ledger: "The work is the only place he is still here. If I stop the work, he disappears. So I will not stop the work."

The next 6 years were the most prolific stretch of Marco's career. He took almost no new orders. He did not need to. He cut, edged, and stitched 70 belts a year for his own ledger, working dawn to dusk, 6 days a week, building a quiet inventory no one knew existed.

By early 2026, the workshop's back room held 412 finished belts on the rack. Each one cut from the same Tuscan bark-tanned hide his father had favored. Each one rolled in unbleached linen, brass buckle wrapped in paper, set aside for someone, even if Marco did not yet know who.