Cassano Pipes

Cassano Pipes is the brand name of the pipe production the Ceresa family sustained for a century in the town of Cassano Magnago, in Lombardy's province of Varese. It is a typical example of the years in which Italian briar pipe-making shifted from a handcraft to a machine-driven factory product: born as a small subcontractor filling someone else's orders, it reached, within two generations, a business selling under its own name to Europe and to America.

The Ceresa Family and the First Workshop

The family's entry into this business dates to the last decade of the 19th century; the year most often cited is 1897. Gerolamo Ceresa's first customer was the Rossi factory in Barasso, which passed on orders exceeding its own capacity to Ceresa. Production was initially split between two locations. Bowls were turned in Cassano Magnago, while bits were shaped and polished in a narrow workshop in Cavaria. Gerolamo's three sons — Pietro, Enrico, and Luigi — took over the business in turn as they reached adulthood; two of them were called up to the front in the First World War, but the workshop continued to operate.

This scattered arrangement was ended in 1919. The family bought a plot on Via Visconti in the town and had a single-roofed factory built, gathering everything under one roof. Since all the machinery ran on electricity, the business came to be known as "Gerolamo Ceresa – Fabbrica elettrica pipe," that is, the "electric pipe factory"; a description that sounds ordinary today meant a real technical edge for a provincial workshop in those years.