A Short History of the Italian Handmade Pipe

The Italian handmade pipe is a branch of briar pipe making that opened late but established its own identity in short order. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the center of this craft was France, which produced most of the shape repertoire still used today, and England, home to houses such as Dunhill, Charatan, and Comoy's. Italy entered the picture not by building factories but through benches of just a few people finishing the work entirely by hand; for this reason the country's contribution is better described as a story of workshops than a story of industry.

The Beginning in Cantù

The first link in the chain is Castello. The workshop Carlo Scotti opened in 1947 in the town of Cantù, part of Como, was founded in a milieu known for furniture and woodworking. Production continues at the same scale today: each pipe passes through the hands of a small handful of craftsmen before it is finished.

Two choices set the brand apart from the era's usual products. The first was the mouthpiece material: instead of hard rubber (vulcanite), which oxidizes and loses its color and taste over the years, acrylic was used. The material feels harder against the teeth, but its surface is permanent. The second was the surface finish; the bowl and shank were completed not with sandblasting but with a deep texture carved by hand. This rustic finish later became the brand's signature under the name Sea Rock. The shapes stayed close to the English repertoire in the early years and found their own proportions in the decades that followed. For details of the mouthpiece-material debate, see the entry mouthpiece materials.

It is reported that the brand found its first buyers across the Atlantic in the 1950s; demand soon outstripped what the workshop could produce. By the 1970s, Castello had gone from being a brand name abroad to a sought-after signature.

Master to Master: The Cucciago Line

What turned the Italian workshop pipe from a single brand into a school is the master-apprentice chain that formed around Cantù. Two names who trained at Castello, Giuseppe Ascorti and Luigi Radice, who had been making pipes since 1960, left the workshop in 1968 and set up their own benches in the neighboring village of Cucciago. A third partner, Gianni Davoli, took charge of distribution. The partnership was named Caminetto; in Italy the three founders were known as "I tre Camini," "the three hearths." The mustache emblem inlaid into the mouthpiece became the brand's mark of recognition, so much so that the pipes came to be called "pipa del baffo."

Breakup and Multiplication

The partnership dissolved at the end of 1979, and the three founders went their separate ways; the stories circulating about the reason for the breakup remain unconfirmed. Radice began producing under his own name in Cucciago in 1980; the workshop is carried on today by his sons Gianluca and Marzio. After a brief pause, the Ascorti family also began using the family name as a stamp; the "A" letter replaced the mustache emblem on the mouthpiece. Giuseppe's son Roberto Ascorti still runs this workshop, founded with his father's and family's support, and the Caminetto name was also revived by the same family in later years.

In the same years, one more name was added from outside the northern Cantù-Cucciago line: the workshop run in Rome by Fritz Becker and his son Paolo Becker put out pipes under the Becker stamp starting in 1979. By the early 1980s, then, Italy was a country not of a single pioneering brand but of a cluster of workshops that had multiplied by branching off from one another.

Shared Elements of the Italian Style

What later came to be called the "Italian style" is not a specific list of shapes but a way of working. Its common features can be listed as follows:

• A workshop scale of just a few people, with production handed down within the family

• A preference for acrylic mouthpieces that do not oxidize

• Hand-carved rustic surfaces where irregularity is treated as a signature rather than a flaw

• Shapes that sought their own proportions rather than copying English molds

The briar tradition France started in Saint-Claude was rebuilt in Italy around the bench rather than the factory. This line, which in thirty years passed from a single pioneer to a whole generation of workshops, is still considered the defining thread of Italian pipe making today.