Detail showing an aristocratic Etruscan in red shoes and toga, together with a priest, or augur, and servants, Tomb of the Augurs, Tarquinia, Italy
Can it be coincidence that shoemakers like Maurizio Gucci of Florence and Salvatore Ferragamo of Campania and Florence came from places with strong Etruscan connections? A tomb painting from the Etruscan city of Tarquinia, executed perhaps around 530-520 BC, shows several mourners in elegant pointed boots. The people portrayed in this “Tomb of the Augurs” may well have had close connections with Rome, where the ruling dynasts were named Tarquinius, and the tyrant-slayer Brutus, credited with founding the Roman Republic a few years after this tomb was decorated (509 BC), was actually a Tarquinius on his mother’s side. When Roman patricians sported red shoes in subsequent centuries, they were simply carrying on ancestral tradition. With the red shoes went a red-striped robe, again in Phoenician purple—a wide stripe for members of the Senate, a narrower stripe for the second-rank aristocrats known as horsemen, equites. After the coming of Christianity, the tradition of wearing red passed from the Roman Senate to the “Sacred Senate,” the College of Cardinals. Cardinal red, in fact, is Roman senatorial red, derived from Phoenician purple (or a cheaper—but not cheap—substitute called cochineal, made by grinding the shells of beetles).
Flamen dialis.jpg
A reenactment of a flamen dialis
The pope also inherited an ancient Roman priestly title, Pontifex Maximus, this too, almost certainly passed down from the Etruscans, along with Etruscan priestly paraphernalia like the folding chair we see a servant carrying in the Tomb of the Augurs. A crooked staff called the lituus (one of these also appears in the Tomb of the Augurs) eventually turned into a symbolic shepherd’s crook for Christian pastors, but only long after it had been used by Etruscan priests called augurs to divine the future by scrutinizing the heavens and the flight patterns of birds. Even the zucchetto, a word that means “little squash,” may owe its stem not to botany, but to the bizarre headgear worn by the ancient Roman priest of Jupiter, the flamen dialis; an alternative title for popes during the Renaissance was “Jupiter the Thunderer.”
https ://www.nybooks.com/daily/2013/03/12/why-pope-wears-red-shoes/