Rinaldo

Rinaldo is a small-scale pipe workshop founded by brothers Elio and Guido Rinaldo in the Adriatic coastal city of Pesaro, Italy. Production under the brand's name began in 1987; the brothers' introduction to briar, however, goes back much further, to 1974, when they were still young. Rinaldo occupies a distinct place within the Italian workshop tradition, both for its fidelity to classic shapes and for its habit of presenting those shapes with rough, hand-worked surfaces.

Founding of the Workshop

According to records, the brothers are of Sicilian origin and moved north to settle in Pesaro at a young age. The same records indicate that they learned the craft at the bench of Mastro de Paja, one of the most influential Italian workshops of the period; some of the masters who passed through that same workshop later founded their own brands, such as Ser Jacopo. After a thirteen-year period of apprenticeship and journeyman work, the Rinaldo brothers began producing under their own name.

The workshop's most distinctive feature is that its scale is deliberately kept small. Annual production runs to roughly fifteen hundred pipes, and every one of them comes from the hands of the two brothers; the brand employs no in-house carving staff. Thanks to Guido's background in jewelry-making, silver ferrules and ornaments are also prepared in-house without being outsourced.