Fassi (Angelo Fassi)

Fassi is the brand of pipes produced by Italian maker Angelo Fassi (b. 1958) at his one-man workshop in the town of Appiano Gentile, in the province of Como. Fassi's principal profession is medicine; after training in medical school he specialized in dentistry and spent most of his working life in endodontics (root canal treatment).

He came to the bench as he neared fifty: he has been making pipes since 2010 and is said to produce around fifty pieces a year.

From Medicine to the Bench

His relationship with the pipe goes back much further. At fourteen, he was given the Savinelli pipe his father had bought hoping it would help him quit cigarettes — an aim it never achieved, and the pipe ended up with the son. During the years he lived in Monza, regular visits to one of the town's now-closed tobacconists nourished his interest. At sixteen, he also got the chance to tour the Caminetto manufactory in Cucciago, during the period when production was under the direction of Giuseppe "Peppino" Ascorti and Luigi Radice.

Decades passed before this interest turned into a craft. The turning point was attending a pipemaking course run by German maker Bertram Safferling in 2008. After the course he kept up his connection with Safferling, and set up his own workshop by taking over the machinery of a local maker who had just put down his bench.