Castello: Trademark Billiard (KK) Tobacco Pipe

The name Castello, "Castle" in Italian, is meant to evoke an aura of pleasant fantasy. Founded by Carlo Scotti in 1947, Castello became a trendsetting marque, being among the first Italian brands to market luxury, hand-made pipes and helping to set the bowl-centric and whimsical standards typical of Italian neoclassicism. Castello has slightly modified the archetypal Billiard proportions in this pipe to make the shape their own, at the same time hewing close enough to tradition to maintain appeal for lovers of the types of functionalistic, yet elegant pipes offered by many Anglo-French pipemakers. Like many standard Billiards, the cylindrical bowl perches with a subtle forward cant before the cylindrical, arrow-straight shank and stem arrangement, and the shank maintains a thickness that is proportional to that of the bowl. Where this pipe deviates is in the proportions between the length of the shank and stem. Where normally the stem length approximates that of the entire stummel, this pipe's stem is shorter, with the shank needing to be a little bit longer than average to make up for the lost length in the stem. The stummel wears the workshop's Trademark finish — the smooth surface and gold and brown hues spotlighting ridges of cross grain flanked to either side of the bowl by ethereal swirls of grain blowing across the walls.