When Wanda Ferragamo brought two of her sons, Massimo and Leonardo, to the United States for the first time in 1970, she wanted to make sure it was a trip to remember. She set out with them from Italy on a boat, the same way her late husband — the legendary Salvatore Ferragamo — traveled when he emigrated to America in 1914.

“She wanted us to experience the same journey he did. She wanted us to understand how hard it was,” Massimo Ferragamo, the chairman of Ferragamo USA, said during a mass honoring his late mother at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York today. “She said, ‘You will go back to the U.S. many times, but the first time you should do it by boat.’ Needless to say, my brother and I experienced the best trip of our lives.”