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Pipe-maker Luigi Viprati of Italy, right, has turned his hobby into a business. On a recent visit to Ukraine, Viprati brought 21 handmade pipes made from 100-year-old briar. He hopes to sell them at auction in December. Serhiy Zavalnyuk Elite artisan's smoky products will be auctioned here in December

makes pipes for smoking, will become visibly upset if you tell him you associate pipes with Britain or Germany.

Viprati, who was on a private visit to Ukraine last week, explains that Italians have been into pipe smoking for ages. After all, he says, some of the best pipes in the world are made from briar that grows on Italy’s Mediterranean coast.

Viprati knows what he’s talking about. The pipes he makes in his workshop in a small village near Brescia, 50 miles outside of Milan, are sought by collectors everywhere. Recently his client list has grown to include Ukrainians, who he hopes will bid at a December auction in Kyiv for 21 exclusive pipes made from nearly 100-year-old briar. The pipes will likely be priced from $1,000.

For a long time, Viprati says, pipe-making was a hobby he refused to turn into a business. Instead, he gave his pipes away as gifts to friends, who sometimes compensated him for costs. In 1970s Italy, he explains, he needed very little money to follow a gypsy way of life – traveling around the country, staying for short periods here and there.

“Those simply were different times, with all those street protests, rallies and revolutions,” he says.

Viprati says he started to smoke a pipe because of his family’s rather modest income. In the beginning, he would stuff the pipe with cigar butts that were too short to be held by people in their fingers.

He says that even now, more than 20 years after he opened up his workshop, he occasionally gives away his pipes, in spite of distributors who remind him that he’s running a business now. Viprati says they push him to make up to 1500 pipes a year.

Viprati remembers how he recently gave one of his pipes to a lady stranger he met in a cafe in downtown Rome. She liked the pipe very much, and he liked her. Viprati says that next morning he felt kind of sorry for what he had done.

“It was a very beautiful pipe, and she only smoked cigarettes.”

Pipe-maker’s inspiration

“I always think about women,” says Viprati when asked what inspires him to create his pipes, which can cost more than 10,000 euros if they’re given amber tips or decorated with silver.

Viprati says his personal recollections and previous experiences often come into play as he chooses a pipe’s shape. Incidentally, the pipes that he made for the Ukrainian market are named “Volkovoy” - named after his Ukrainian business partner Natalia Volkova. The point was – to commemorate our friendship,” Viprati says.

It is not only women who inspire the Italian artisan, however. He previously produced a “Dali” series of pipes, inspired by shapes from the Spanish surrealist’s canvases.

Viprati says that during his visit to Kyiv, he made some sketches of the domes of local Orthodox churches. He says he might shape some pipe lids after their model.

Sometimes, Viprati says, he needs no external inspiration whatsoever; simply cutting a chunk of briar in two and seeing its core can be enough.

“When I see the ornaments on the briar that often look like tongues of flame, that really triggers my imagination, and I start dreaming about the pipe I am going to make.”

Asked to portray a typical person who smokes his pipes, Viprati doesn’t hesitate. He says his customers, both men and women, often spend hours smoking pipes, and treat them as companions as they reflect, reminisce or dream.“You have to be relaxed, tranquil and thoughtful to enjoy a pipe. It is very different from nervously swallowing up a cigarette, where you get distracted even by shaking off the ashes.”