Ser Jacopo: Sandblasted Dublin with Silver (S2) (E) (Maxima Maxima Maxima Maxima) Tobacco Pipe

Founded in 1982 by Giancarlo Guidi, Ser Jacopo has built a reputation for crafting high-quality briars that are renowned for their robust proportions and playful shaping cues. The Italian atelier's style has since defined the Pesaro style of pipe making, each of their pipes imbued with a sense of character and reflecting the whimsical creativity that went into crafting them. Though Guidi passed away in 2012, his legacy lives on not only in the pipes he crafted, or the company he founded, but in the language of design that he helped to pioneer. This Dublin is an impressive piece, as it's part of the workshop's Maxima series, being stamped four times with the designation to mark it as a significantly larger piece than normal from the Pesaro carvers. Thoroughly thick through its bowl, this piece boasts a wide transition that gives way to an extremely slender shank, pushing all of the visual emphasis onto the fore. The shank itself is impressively lengthy, extending the reach of this pipe to more than eight inches while slenderizing subtly toward a broad band of silver at the junction to a short saddle stem of black acrylic. Up front, the bowl stands on a rounded heel and flares out to a broad, subtly domed rim, where the walls reveal a compressed, ovoid shape in the style of the Opera: nicely altering the timeless profile in charming fashion. Dressed in a crisp, auburn-tinged sandblast, the stummel showcases rippling bands of growth rings flowing down the walls of the bowl, with ample contrast offered by the silver band.