Ascorti Business Rusticated Stack Billiard Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Ascorti belongs to a historic lineage in Italian artisan pipe-making. Guiseppe “Peppino” Ascorti was first employed as a pipe-maker in the 1950s, in Carlo Scotti’s Castello workshop in Cantu. There he met Luigi Radice, and in the 1960s the two decided to leave Castello to create their own pipe-making workshop, under the name “Caminetto.” At the end of the 1970s, Guiseppe Ascorti and Luigi Radice left Caminetto and once more decided to start new ventures. Luigi Radice founded the Radice pipe workshop, and Guiseppe’s son Roberto Ascorti, who had also worked in the Caminetto workshop since he was a child, decided to create a workshop under his own name. Roberto was joined not only by his father, but also many of the talented craftsmen who had formerly worked for Caminetto. In 1980, the Ascorti workshop was born.

After the split of Caminetto, a number of its notable craftsmen went their own way, launching new workshops and new makes and doing so in new styles befitting their personal tastes. Of these new projects, it would be the Ascorti family that remained most faithful to the aesthetics of Caminetto, and indeed to the earliest iteration of the latter, which many collectors to be superior to what followed. Thus, if one wants to acquire such a pipe without spending the hefty premium that comes with an “Ascorti/Radice Era” Caminetto, the simplest solution is to buy an Ascorti instead. For example, with its muscular physique, stacked bowl, rugged texture, and colorful Lucite mouthpiece, an Ascorti such as this one could easily be mistaken for Caminetto Business (a finish whose name and likeness Ascorti would retain after Caminetto’s 1970s dissolution). I imagine a “blind smoke test” would yield similar results.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating.

Details:

Length: 6″ / 152.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.86 / 21.33mm

Bowl Depth: 2.28″ / 57.91mm

Weight: 1.9oz / 56g