Italian Estates: Baldo Baldi Smooth Bent Egg Tobacco Pipe

The late Italian carver Baldo Baldi leveraged his background as an architect to craft some truly handsome pipes. Baldi was an esteemed and well-respected artisan who had high standards for his pipes, only utilizing briar that had been aged for 20-25 years. This bent Egg is a fine example of his exacting shaping and refined engineering. Rendered in dramatic neoclassical proportions, this piece boasts a tall bowl that is thrust at the fore of the composition by a sharply lifted heel. The bowl fills the palm with girth and houses a rather broad and deep chamber within its thick, softly contoured insulating walls. The boxy shank adds some firm, structural lines to the composition and flares upward from the low-set transition into a demurely curved mouthpiece of white acrylic. A warm auburn smooth finish dresses the stummel and highlights fine wisps of flame grain across the flanks of the bowl.