Spanu (Tom Spanu)

Spanu is an Italian pipe workshop founded in 1979 by Sardinian master Tommaso "Tom" Spanu and carried on today by his son. The trading name of the company set up to market the pipes is Novarte S.N.C. di Spanu Tommaso, though the products are commonly known as "Tom Spanu." The work that has done the most to promote the brand is briar pipes with bodies clad in cork oak bark.

From Chiaramonti to Varese

Spanu was born in 1944 in Chiaramonti, in northern Sardinia. Sources agree that while still young he left the island and, in the early 1960s, went to Gavirate, in the province of Varese in northern Italy, where pipe workshops were then concentrated; the job had been arranged by a relative. His years there brought him into the circle of Alberto Paronelli, one of the most influential pipe designers and dealers of the period. Paronelli both got him trained alongside experienced carvers and personally worked with him on shape and design.

The result was that he took part in making Paronelli's distributed premium Clairmont line. It is reported that the brand name is a Frenchified form of Spanu's home town, and that according to records he was able to strike his own name on some of these pipes as well. Over the more than fifteen years he spent in the north, he shared the same milieu as names like Giuseppe Ascorti and Luigi Radice, who would go on to found the Caminetto brand. This generation is the one that drove the leap forward in Italian handmade pipe making in the 1960s and 1970s.