Paronelli Pipe
Thirty thousand collectibles, relics and historical machinery in the exhibition that has been alongside the laboratory since the 1970s, to tell the magic of the pipe between past, present and future.
The “First Italian Pipe Museum” is located in Gavirate, established in the late seventies by Jean Marie Alberto Paronelli, cataloging and exhibiting the numerous and valuable pieces collected during his travels abroad.
Here he has always welcomed friends and customers, telling anecdotes and stories of real life, expressing himself with not only verbal but also pictorial and sculptural inspiration. Jean Marie was born in Gavirate on 21 December 1914. At the age of 18, after studying in Italy and Switzerland, he completed his professional training in London. In 1968 he became the first Italian member of the prestigious “Confrérie de Maitres Pipiers” of St. Claude in Jura in France, the oldest institution in the world in the field of the pipe. He is a member of many prestigious pipari clubs in the world, as well as the founder of the Italian Pipe Academy, being the first to hold the role of Magnificent Rector. In 1984 he founded “The Academie Internationale de la Pipe”, an association that still plays an informative-editorial role today. Today in the museum you can admire more than thirty thousand collectibles, machinery and relics that tell the magic of the world of the pipe.
In the small artisan workshop in Gavirate, however, Ariberto Paronelli, the grandson, continues to make handmade pipes with the help of common tools such as lathe, rasps, files, pads and rozzellini. The procedure follows the natural predispositions of the piece of briar, worked according to the shape and according to the grain.