Moretti

Moretti is a handmade pipe workshop founded in 1968 by Igino Moretti in the town of Recanati, in Italy's Marche region. The founder's son-in-law, Marco Biagini, has headed production for more than forty years; today his son Luca joins him as well. Working olive wood and bog oak alongside briar, and a small briar dot inlaid into the stem, are the brand's most distinctive features.

The Pipe Tradition in Recanati

Pipe making in this small Marche town near the Adriatic is considered to date back to the 1850s. At the start of the twentieth century, the town's established workshop was Hully Briars. According to the manufacturer's own history, the firm worked with about forty employees, made half of the pipes it produced for other companies, and sold the remaining half under the brand BEP-SON, derived from the first syllables of the owners' names, Beppe and Sonia. Igino Moretti and his wife joined the workshop in its most crowded period, when the number of employees approached fifty; Igino gradually became its principal pipe maker.

Hully Briars's closure brought Moretti to the brink of a career change: he had passed the railway examination, and working as a train engineer offered a concrete livelihood. Choosing to stay in the craft, the master founded his own brand, Moretti Recanati, in 1968. Sources give 1950 as the year Hully Briars closed; the manufacturer's own history does not state a year.