From A Tiny Workshop in Italy
Maurizio and His Pipes: The Rare Beauty Of Something Made By Hand
December 2008

Anyone that knows me knows that I spend a lot of time in Pesaro, a town high up on the Adriatic, just where Central Italy starts to morph into the North.

That's where my best friend lives and teaches and I take a train up to spend time with her pretty close to once a month. It's my second home, really. I have furnished a kitchen there over the years, with many of my favourite pots and pans and knives. I have wines there, waiting for me, throwing off their sediments. I just take a book and hop on a train to go to Pesaro: I don't even pack a toothbrush.

And that's when I spend a lot of time with Maurizio, an artisan pipe-maker, one of the truly most romantic men I've ever known.

Many evenings the four of us will go out to dinner and his wife Stefania will make jagged sketches on the back of a paper napkin, her hand moving at perfect odds with whatever she happens to be saying.

'There is an interesting art show coming to town next month', she'll say, her zippy pen point apparently trying to reconfigure the shape of a snail, the image itself, anything but impressive.

Ever few minutes Maurzio will glance over at her hand and occasionally you'll catch a troubled look on his face, that he's actually disturbed by the sketch.

It's fascinating to see when it happens.

Because that is the exact moment one of his pipes begins its existence. And like all births, there will be lots of labour involved.

I visit Maurizio often in his studio, a tiny room in the charming provincial old town where the houses are made of cobble-stones and the window boxes overspill geraniums.

My eyes will pass over his pipes in their various stages of completion and every so often I'll catch one that I recognise: From paper napkin to chunky-wedge of briar to pipe, all in painstakingly slow steps, each decision weighed and reweighed against the afternoon light that filters through the studio windows.

The thing I like most about our afternoons together in his studio is that he is at once himself and yet aware of himself, the two mental stances perfectly at ease with one another. I can ask him a silly open-ended question, such as, 'What makes a beautiful pipe, in your opinion', and he'll take the question and run with it, quoting Boccaccio and John Ashberry, as if everything he's ever studied was in preparation for this question.

That he is wearing a faded, 80-year old lab coat, that his hair is standing up, his impassioned gaze meeting mine through his sawdust-coated eye glasses, none of it is lost on either of us. He's both a artisan and scholar in provincial Italy. AND he's a kid that grew up waiting for the Beatles albums to arrive in the local store. The first one to wear blue jeans. To grow his hair long. To stay up all night listening to the Jimi Hendrix concert, his jaw gaping at the crazy things that came through the radio and how little it seemed to make sense to what was going on outside his window here in Italy.

I don't smoke, but over the years I've purchased two of his pipes, one for a good friend of mine on his 40th birthday, and one of my own, its beautiful curves resting alongside my right hand as I type into this computer.

Mine has never had tobacco in it, and it likely never will. As a non-smoker I don't really have a lot of the stuff around the school here in Lecce. And that my pipe never will be smoked doesn't bother me in the slightest: that's not why I have it.

For me a pipe from Maurizio represents a time long gone in Italy, when artisans worked for the whims of nobility.

No one would go into pipe making today as so few smoke them now, so Maurizio's studio represents the end of an era to me. A time when something made by hand really meant something.

Doubt it, just touch one of his pipes and you'll feel the craftsmanship, the way you feel the dashboard of a Jaguar, or the way a Stradivarius must feel, for those allowed to hold one.

Whenever I pass my fingers over one of Maurizio's pipes I'm always confronted with three seemingly opposing feelings. The first is the realisation that I'm no longer young enough to devote my entire life to a single craft as he has, that even if I dropped what I am doing today and started to study, I'd never be able to recreate this beauty.

The second is that the world is still a place where you can still find the wares of those who HAVE dedicated themselves to a single craft, contemplating out the details in little studios, tucked away in small provincial cities.

The third is that it won't always be.

(Here Mauri is smoking his own pipe, 'a pipe so ugly that I kept it for myself. Funny. Today I couldn't love this old girl any more than I do', he says, his fingers running over the invisible blemishes that only Maurizio would fret.)

If you'd like to see some of Maurizio's beautiful hand-made pipes, click here.

If you'd like to see our 2009 calendar (and even pictures of my best friend that lives in Pesaro), click here.

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Fotografie e testo, Silvestro Silvestori, Agosto, Lecce, Italia.