The workshop is reached by a marble staircase that smells of sfogliatella from the pasticceria below. On the second-floor landing, a small brass plate reads Russo Guanti in serifs that have been there since 1898.

Carmela Russo, the fourth of her family to make gloves at this address, is fifty-seven. She wears a dark apron over a cotton blouse and works at a long table beneath three windows that look onto the courtyard.

The table holds her brass hand-formers, twelve of them, in graduated sizes from a child's to a baritone's. They are oxidised to a soft brown and have a faint sheen where her palm has rested against them for forty years.

Her leather comes from a tannery in Solofra, half an hour inland. She uses primarily kidskin, occasionally peccary for surgeons who request extra grip, and a fine Ethiopian hair sheep for the lightest evening gloves.

A pelt is first tirato, stretched. Russo dampens it with a sponge and pulls it diagonally across her knee, then across the grain, judging how the skin will give. A pelt that resists is set aside for a stiffer model.

Cutting is done by hand with shears she has owned since her apprenticeship. The pattern pieces are: the trank, which forms the front and back of the hand, the thumb, the four fourchettes that run between the fingers, and the small wedges called quirks at the base of each finger.

“Cutting is done by hand with shears she has owned since her apprenticeship.”

A pair of gloves requires twenty-two separate pieces. Russo cuts a pair in about forty minutes if the skin is good. If the skin is poor, she discards it and writes a polite note to the tannery.

Stitching is done with a curved needle and waxed silk thread, prick-stitched at twelve stitches per centimetre. The seams sit on the outside, neat and visible, in the Neapolitan tradition. Parisian gloves hide their seams. Neapolitan gloves do not.

A standard pair takes Russo about eleven hours of stitching, spread over three days. She works in the morning, breaks for lunch and a short nap, and stitches again in the late afternoon when, she says, the light comes in at the angle her mother liked.

Her opera clients are mostly sopranos and mezzos from the Teatro di San Carlo. They need gloves that fit through three acts of arm movement without binding the wrist. Russo fits them by drawing around the hand on butcher paper and measuring six points with a tailor's tape.

Her surgical clients are largely cardiac surgeons in Rome and Milan. Their gloves are not for operating but for the cold drives between hospitals, when stiffness in the fingers is a professional hazard. She uses a slightly heavier peccary and lines the gloves with cashmere from Biella.

Cardinals come occasionally. They want a particular shade of crimson kidskin that Russo dyes herself using a recipe involving cochineal and a small amount of iron sulfate. She will not say more about the recipe.

Finishing is done with a small gas iron whose flame she adjusts by ear. She slides the glove onto the brass former, then runs the iron over the leather in long strokes, setting the seams and smoothing the grain.

Her sign-off, on each pair, is a single stitch in pale yellow silk inside the cuff. The colour was chosen by her great-grandfather in 1898 and has not been changed.

She trains no apprentice. Her daughter is a lawyer in Bologna. A young man from Casoria asked, two years ago, to learn. Russo agreed, and he comes on Saturdays. She does not yet say whether she thinks he will continue.

A pair of her gloves costs between three hundred and eight hundred euros. The waiting list is fourteen months. She does not advertise. She has never owned a website.

From the window, the laundry of the courtyard hangs in long horizontal lines. The brass formers wait on the table, palms up, fingers slightly curled, as if about to take hold of something just beyond reach.