Smooth Brown Tomato (Two Jellyfish) Tobacco Pipe

Ser Jacopo alum Simone Gaudenzi is well-trained in the Pesaro school of pipe making, which emphasizes clean lines and panache in design. Today, Gaudenzi crafts Valbruna pipes in the small town of Gabicce Mare on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, which plays an important role in the company's nomenclature: per Adriatic legend, Valbruna is a lost, sunken city like Atlantis. Gaudenzi ages the briar for his pipes, which are produced in limited quantities. True to his maritime roots, he uses Jellyfish to identify levels of quality.

Gaudenzi gave this Tomato a nearly ladle-like profile, owing to the barely-there aft wall that almost immediately fades into the top of the heavily upturned shank. The plump bowl is quite substantial in the hand, its wide orientation giving this piece much of its weight of nearly one-fifth of a pound. That weight comes despite a relatively brief length of 4.77 inches — just outside Nosewarmer territory. Flame grain decorates the bowl's bottom half below a wealth of birdseye around the rim, with a similar orientation on the wide shank. The stem is a generously bent piece of black acrylic that tapers back to the bit, continuing the ladle-like profile expressed by the bowl.