Le Nuvole Partially Sandblasted Bent Billiard w/ Boxwood Estate Briar Pipe, Italian Estates

Description

Maurizio Tombari is one of the most interesting figures to emerge from the so-called “Pesaro school” of pipe making, which is a high bar to clear. Trained as a painter at Italy’s Accademia di Belle Art di Urbino, Tombari would ultimately join one of the founding pipe workshops of the Pesaro school, Mastro de Paja, working alongside its founders Giancarlo Guidi and Giannino Spadoni. After Guidi Mastro de Paja left to found Ser Jacopo with Bruto Sordini (another Mastro de Paja alum), Tombari joined him, working under Guidi until 1996. At this point, it was time for Tombari to depart again, this time with the intention of creating his own, independent pipe venture. But he would not be entirely on his own; like his former colleague Bruto Sordini, who had departed Ser Jacopo in the early 1990s to create Don Carlos pipes with his wife Rosaria, Maurizio Tombari was joined by his wife, Stefania, in his new endeavor. Together, Maurizio and Stefania Tombari created Le Nuvole, a partnership between two lifelong artists with a view to creating pipes as unique and harmonious as their meteorological namesake.

One of the counterintuitive things you learn after handling thousands of pipes every year, for a good part of your life, is that the simplest shapes are by far the most diverse. In other words, there are more ways to render a Dublin than, say, a bulldog or a blowfish. I imagine the reason for this is a mixture of the conceptual and the practical: some shapes have been around for centuries, and as an idea becomes firmly entrenched in the popular imagination, its boundaries become more permeable; on the other hand, the fewer defining features an object has, the greater the freedom one has to add or subtract from its other properties without altering its “essence.” Bent billiards are simple and, as such, they are many. The hard part, then, isn’t so much making one unique as it is making one interesting. This one from the Tombaris of Le Nuvole is very interesting, though, to be fair, so is just about everything they make. Even for a bent billiard, it is strikingly supple and light, despite its taller, egg-like bowl and rather thorough, ring grain sandblast finish. In this way, it’s not unlike an old Dunhill LC rendition, or an Ingo Garbe, but slimmed down to the point where it’s the pipe’s shank and mouthpiece that wisp up and along like smoke from burning embers—or, perhaps more appropriately, the clouds invoked by its moniker.

The condition is great. Some slight wear to the rim and minor finish fading.

Details:

Length: 5.8″ / 147.3mm

Bowl Width: 0.79 / 20.06mm

Bowl Depth: 1.82″ / 46.22mm

Weight: 1.4oz / 42g