Spanu (Tom Spanu)

Spanu is an Italian pipe workshop founded in 1979 by Sardinian master Tommaso "Tom" Spanu and carried on today by his son. The trading name of the company set up to market the pipes is Novarte S.N.C. di Spanu Tommaso, though the products are commonly known as "Tom Spanu." The work that has done the most to promote the brand is briar pipes with bodies clad in cork oak bark.

From Chiaramonti to Varese

Spanu was born in 1944 in Chiaramonti, in northern Sardinia. Sources agree that while still young he left the island and, in the early 1960s, went to Gavirate, in the province of Varese in northern Italy, where pipe workshops were then concentrated; the job had been arranged by a relative. His years there brought him into the circle of Alberto Paronelli, one of the most influential pipe designers and dealers of the period. Paronelli both got him trained alongside experienced carvers and personally worked with him on shape and design.

The result was that he took part in making Paronelli's distributed premium Clairmont line. It is reported that the brand name is a Frenchified form of Spanu's home town, and that according to records he was able to strike his own name on some of these pipes as well. Over the more than fifteen years he spent in the north, he shared the same milieu as names like Giuseppe Ascorti and Luigi Radice, who would go on to found the Caminetto brand. This generation is the one that drove the leap forward in Italian handmade pipe making in the 1960s and 1970s.

Return to the Island and the Workshop

In 1979, with support from his brothers, he returned to Sardinia and set up his own workshop in Laerru; the business moved to Sassari in 1999. The reason for the return was raw material: Sardinian briar holds a place apart among Italian makers for its heat resistance and its color leaning toward red. It is known that during the Laerru years he harvested and dried his own briar, carrying out the cutting and curing stages of the burls at the workshop. Hand tools dominate the working method; shape is often decided not by prior sketching but by following the burl's grain, so that no two pipes are the same.

Cork Cladding and Other Woods

The workshop's distinctive work is what is called "sughero" in Italian — cork cladding. The briar body is clad in bark from the island's extensive cork oak (Quercus suber) forests; the resulting pipe is lighter than an ordinary briar body and leaves a rough texture in the hand. The technique is also considered a link to Sardinia's long-standing cork craft.

Spanu did not stop at briar. He also worked with other woods such as wild olive, cherry, myrtle, juniper, oak, beech, and boxwood, sometimes combining more than one wood in a single pipe. Among these, the rarest are lemonwood pipes, distinguished by their white-to-pale-yellow color; these examples also carry the additional stamp "LIMONE."

Afterward

Tom Spanu died on 26 August 2015 at the age of 71. Some of his work is exhibited at the Italian pipe museum in Gavirate, where he spent his apprenticeship years. The workshop is carried on in Sassari by his son Massimiliano Spanu, who worked alongside his father for many years.