Radice Silk Cut G Sandblasted Dublin w/ Faux Bamboo Estate Briar Pipe, Italian Estates

Description

Radice is one of the great Italian workshop pipe makes, belonging to a historic lineage of such workshops. The company began as a family affair, being established in 1980 by Luigi Radice, along with his son, Gianluca, and father, Paolo. But Radice’s pipe-making ‘family’ is a little larger than that. Prior to founding Radice, Luigi ran Caminetto, which he had founded with Guiseppe Ascorti in 1968. Prior to Caminetto, Radice had worked alongside Ascorti in the Castello factory, under the supervision of its owner, Carlo Scotti. It’s quite an impressive genealogy, which is clearly reflected in the quality of Radice pipes.

A spiritual successor to Caminetto’s Sable D’Or, Radice’s Silk Cut is the workshop’s signature sandblast finish. As is quite common in Italian pipes, these blasts are a little more shallow than their English and American counterparts, instead focusing on a consistent expression of the briar’s horizontal and vertical striations. The result is a texture that would certainly qualify as a ring grain finish, but also has a kind of “webbed” or “woven” character—not unlike its namesake fabric. This particular Silk Cut is an example of the workshop’s extra large “G” size grade, and also features another signature element—this time, specific to Radice—in the form of a shank whose briar has been hand worked to imitate the bamboo extensions of mid-century pipes (a subtle form of mimicry that, nevertheless, has its own name in broader art and design history: “skeuomorphism”).

 

-J.M.

The condition is great. Some very minor inner rim darkening and similarly minor handling marks.

 

Details:

Length: 6.2″ / 157.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.98 / 24.89mm

Bowl Depth: 1.53″ / 38.86mm

Weight: 2.3oz / 66g