Italian Estates: Moretti Smooth Bent Dublin (𝛿𝛿𝛿𝛿) (1) (2020) Tobacco Pipe

Igino Moretti founded the Moretti Recanati brand in 1968 in Recanati, Italy, a small town with a rich pipe making history that stretches back to 1850. Igino actually worked for one of the town's largest pipe factories, before financial pressures stemming from World War 2 forced them to close in 1950. After many years, Igino handed off control of production to his son-in-law Marco Biagini, who has diversified the design principles of the workshop to include the classic profiles of Anglo-French manufacturers and Danish carvers. Moretti's renditions of classic shapes are often decidedly neoclassical, the Italian workshop doing well to exaggerate proportions and place emphasis on the bowl without detracting from the rest of the composition. This bent Dublin is a lovely example of that, complete with a dramatically tapering stretch of shank and demurely curved stem that's here possessed of a distinctive diamond shape which frames the entire pairing with four crisp ridgelines. This firm shaping lends the aft section of this pipe a great deal of intrigue visually, balancing out the visual weight of the bowl quite well and actually serving to frame its heel, firming it up a good deal. Said bowl flares out as it rises to more than two inches tall, holding within its thick walls a capacious chamber and growing upward to a plateau-crowned rim. Dressed in a warm auburn stain and paired to a genuine cumberland stem, there's plenty of rich contrast on offer here, as well as beautiful grain.