Sauro Pipe

Sauro Pipe is the brand of pipes produced single-handedly by Italian maker Gioacchino Sauro (b. 1959) at his workshop in Palermo, Sicily. Sauro came to pipe making from a completely different profession: he studied agricultural science, worked for five years as a researcher at the University of Palermo, then worked as an agricultural consultant and took a post in the region's plant-health unit. The brand rests not on a factory but on the one-man workshop this second pursuit grew into.

The Move Into Making

By Sauro's own account, his first attempts at pipe making came in 2009, self-taught; sources date his turning it into a serious pursuit to 2011. The decisive figure in this period was Carlo Riggio, owner of Palermo's established tobacconist Tabaccheria Riggio; Sauro gained his first technical knowledge from conversations with him and from publications devoted to the subject. The suggestion that he needed to find a master also came from Riggio. In 2012 he approached Italian maker Mimmo Romeo and was accepted as an apprentice in his workshop, where he also met Brazilian maker Eder Mathias.

The event that introduced Sauro to a wider audience was his participation in the 2014 Chicago Pipe Show. The same year, together with Romeo, he visited the workshop of Danish master Tom Eltang. Another stop that broadened his technical range was the few days he spent in 2019 with Gabriele dal Fiume, where he learned the hand-drilling technique the Danish school popularized in the 1950s and 1960s. The workshop's turn toward asymmetric shapes considered freehand dates from after this point.