Two Schools of Italian Pipe Making: Pesaro and Como

Italian pipe making came of age after the war not in a single center but in two separate nuclei hundreds of kilometers apart. One was Pesaro on the Adriatic coast; the other was the Lombardy line north of Milan taking in Como, Cantù, Cucciago, and Varese. Untangling the kinship between brand names most often comes down to knowing which of these two nuclei a given brand is tied to.

Pesaro: From Master to Master

In Pesaro, small workshops that knew one another sprang up during the 1960s and 1970s; the region's brands were born largely in the hands of people who broke away from these workshops. The name at the center of the network is Giancarlo Guidi. After making pipes as an amateur for a time, Guidi founded the Mastro de Paja workshop in 1972; when he and his partner Giannino Spadoni parted ways in 1981, he left the workshop and founded Ser Jacopo the following year. Bruto Sordini, who trained under Guidi, also left with him in 1981; in later years he would become known under the name Don Carlos. Giorgio Imperatori, who founded Il Ceppo, had known Guidi since Pesaro's earliest years; the brand's production begins in the late 1970s. Names that emerged later, such as Rinaldo and L'Anatra, are likewise extensions of this same web of kinship.

The region's style is considered neoclassical. What is renewed is not the mold but the proportion: established English shapes such as the billiard or the bulldog remain recognizable, but the transitions between shank and bowl, the stance, and the balance of volume are reworked. Following the direction of the briar's grain during cutting is also a habit credited to the region.

The Como Line: From Factory to Workshop

The story in the north begins in 1947 with the Castello workshop Carlo Scotti opened in Cantù; the region's high-end pipe tradition spread out from there. Peppino Ascorti joined Castello's benches in 1959, Luigi Radice in 1961. Ascorti left at the end of 1968 to start his own business and brought along his neighbor in Cucciago, Radice; once Milan tobacconist Gianni Davoli took on distributing the pair's pipes, the brand came to be known by the name Caminetto. The trio broke up at the end of 1979: first Radice, then Ascorti left the workshop. Radice founded the brand bearing his own name in 1980; the Caminetto name, in time, passed to the Ascorti family.

The region's second strand is the factory tradition. Achille Savinelli and Enea Buzzi entered into partnership in 1947; Savinelli took charge of sales, Buzzi of production, and the pipes reached the market under the Savinelli name. The manufacture Buzzi ran in the town of Brebbia, near Varese, began being stamped with the Brebbia name from 1953 onward; the link between the two names broke off completely in 1956. The Rovera family workshop, founded in Varese in 1911, meanwhile turned in 1974 into the Ardor brand, taking its name from Angelo and Dorelio Rovera, and moved entirely from series production to fully hand-finished pipes.

A Question of Scale

What separates the two traditions is a matter of scale as much as geography. The Radice family's annual output stays under two thousand; Caminetto's production rose from three thousand to seven thousand a year over the course of the 1970s. Brebbia and Savinelli, by contrast, were founded from the outset as factories meant to produce at a steady volume. Scale alone, however, does not determine style: factory-rooted makers went on to develop hand-finished top series over time, and, as in the case of Ardor, some turned their production over entirely to handwork.