Vitale (Piero Vitale)

Vitale is the pipe workshop bearing the name of Italian master Piero Vitale. Working in northern Italy at Certosa di Pavia, near Pavia, Vitale was introduced to the world of handmade pipes through a friend in 2014, and finished his first pipe within a few months. Being the grandson of a carpenter and luthier explains a familiarity with woodworking dating back to his childhood; some of the workshop's habits trace back to this early period.

Workshop and Method

Vitale's production is not a series but a piece-by-piece one, each pipe passing through his own hands. His annual output hovers around two hundred pipes. From rough shaping to final sanding, the work proceeds with files, rasps, sandpaper, and small milling tools; the lathe comes into play only for cutting the mouthpiece. His choice of burl is deliberately narrow: the master buys briar blocks from Italian cutters and requires that the blocks have rested at least two years. He works with both plateaux and ebauchon blocks. For mouthpieces he uses German ebonite; for decorative accents he turns to materials such as boxwood, cocobolo, horn, and bamboo. For a general comparison of mouthpiece materials, see the mouthpiece materials entry.

Formal Language

No pipe leaving the workshop is a copy of another; even so, a recurring preference stands out in the proportions of the bodies. The bowl is made large either widthwise or lengthwise, sometimes in both directions at once; the shank, correspondingly, is short and thin. This proportional choice is preserved not only in craftsman-made bodies such as horn, egg, and "elephant's foot" shapes, but also in established molds such as panel billiard, Rhodesian, or Oom Paul. Production thus sits somewhere between the freehand approach, which allows room for shapes outside the mold, and the classic repertoire of shapes. Among the sources of inspiration the master cites are Tom Eltang, Kent Rasmussen, Eder Mathias, Gian Maria Gamboni, and Viktor Yashtylov.

Grading and Design Work

The workshop's grading system looks not only at grain quality but also at design complexity. So a sandblasted body, if its shape is more demanding and its grain finer, can receive the same grade as a smooth-surfaced pipe. Records indicate five steps are used; in ascending order, one star, two stars, three stars (considered equivalent), the moon, and, rarely given, the sun at the very top.

Alongside his own workshop production, Vitale has also taken on designing factory-made series in collaboration with Italian pipe firms. The first was released under the name Bluebird, the second under Proxima. Bluebird is a joint effort with Molina, made up of classic shapes reinterpreted with an emphasis on lightness and balance. In Proxima, production was left to the Molina and Paolo Croci workshops, while briar selection, model design, and oversight of production stages remained with Vitale. In both series the bodies are reproduced from the master's own drawings and prototypes. Vitale is also counted among the members of the Accademia della Pipa, which brings together Italy's pipe craftsmen.