Two Schools of Italian Pipe Making: Pesaro and Como

Italian pipe making came of age after the war not in a single center but in two separate nuclei hundreds of kilometers apart. One was Pesaro on the Adriatic coast; the other was the Lombardy line north of Milan taking in Como, Cantù, Cucciago, and Varese. Untangling the kinship between brand names most often comes down to knowing which of these two nuclei a given brand is tied to.

Pesaro: From Master to Master

In Pesaro, small workshops that knew one another sprang up during the 1960s and 1970s; the region's brands were born largely in the hands of people who broke away from these workshops. The name at the center of the network is Giancarlo Guidi. After making pipes as an amateur for a time, Guidi founded the Mastro de Paja workshop in 1972; when he and his partner Giannino Spadoni parted ways in 1981, he left the workshop and founded Ser Jacopo the following year. Bruto Sordini, who trained under Guidi, also left with him in 1981; in later years he would become known under the name Don Carlos. Giorgio Imperatori, who founded Il Ceppo, had known Guidi since Pesaro's earliest years; the brand's production begins in the late 1970s. Names that emerged later, such as Rinaldo and L'Anatra, are likewise extensions of this same web of kinship.

The region's style is considered neoclassical. What is renewed is not the mold but the proportion: established English shapes such as the billiard or the bulldog remain recognizable, but the transitions between shank and bowl, the stance, and the balance of volume are reworked. Following the direction of the briar's grain during cutting is also a habit credited to the region.