Brentegani Pipe (Michele Brentegani)

Brentegani Pipe is the one-man pipe workshop run under his own name by Michele Brentegani, working in Verona, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. Recorded as born in 1989, the maker began making pipes in 2015 and turned it into his full-time profession in 2020. No mass production comes out of the workshop; every piece passes through the same hands from design to final polish.

From Wood to Pipes

Brentegani's diploma has nothing to do with pipemaking: he trained in traditional Chinese medicine and tui na massage. Woodworking, however, was a pursuit carried over from childhood; before pipes he made unrelated objects such as bows and bamboo flutes. In 2015, after seeing a friend's churchwarden pipe, he tried making one of his own. He managed to shape the bowl with the means available to him; the mouthpiece, however, remained a problem he could not solve, both in method and material. According to the account, this knot was resolved after correspondence with Brebbia, one of Italy's established manufacturers, resulted in three mouthpieces being sent to him. The next few years passed working part-time and largely through trial and error.