Dino Da Campione

Dino da Campione is the stamp Milan-born Leonardo Airaghi (1929-2010) applied to his pipes. The second half of the name comes from Campione d'Italia, an Italian enclave on the shore of Lake Lugano, surrounded on all sides by Switzerland's canton of Ticino: this small town, legally part of the province of Como, was where Airaghi carried out his main profession.

Pipe making was never a livelihood for him; the production that began in 1969 never reached three hundred pieces in any of the thirty-six years it continued.

The Person Behind the Name

According to accounts, Airaghi's main profession was managing the Campione casino, and he took much of his orders while holding this position. That he ran the two pursuits side by side also explains why production never grew to workshop scale. The family is said to have descended from a line that produced painters and sculptors in nineteenth-century Milan; though this connection is often repeated around the brand, it is not documented in independent sources.

Distribution of the stamp within Italy was equally narrow: for years it ran solely through the Novelli tobacconist in Rome. Beyond that, pipes went directly from Switzerland to buyers elsewhere; the addresses they reached ranged from North and South America to Gulf countries and the Far East.