Caminetto: Brand History, Series, and Reading the Stamps

Caminetto is a pipe brand founded in 1968 in the northern Italian village of Cucciago, recognized by the mustache emblem inlaid on its mouthpiece. Because both the manufacturing arrangement and the stamping style changed between its first period, a little over a decade long, and its second period, which began again in the mid-1980s, the brand is treated as a separate dating topic among collectors.

The Partnership and the Brand Name

At the brand's core are two makers and a merchant. Giuseppe Ascorti, known in the circle as "Peppino," had worked more than a decade at the Castello workshop in Cantù, where he learned to work briar. His next-door neighbor in Cucciago, Luigi Radice, had also been making pipes at Castello since 1960. The two left the workshop at the end of 1968 and set up their own bench in Cucciago. The third partner was Gianni Davoli, who ran a tobacconist's shop in Milan; thanks to his wholesale contacts in America, sales and distribution fell to him.

The brand's name is the diminutive of the Italian word "camino," meaning fireplace. In time the partners themselves came to be called "i tre camini" — the three chimneys. Ascorti's and Radice's thick mustaches are the source both of the emblem inlaid on the mouthpiece and of the phrase associated with the brand, "la pipa del baffo" (the mustache pipe).