Mastro de Paja Il Boia pipes

The Il Boia pipe in a Quentin Tarantino movie!

The history of Mastro de Paja pipes is truly fascinating, and one of the most remarkable anecdotes concerns the Il Boia collection. This collection enjoyed a totally unexpected success in 2015, thanks to... a film! It all began in December 2014, when Mr Montini's girlfriend told him about the imminent release of a new Quentin Tarantino film: The Hateful Eight. Watching the trailer, she noticed that a character in it was smoking a pipe, one that looked surprisingly familiar. Is it a Mastro de Paja? Intrigued, they both watch the film and discover to their astonishment that actor Kurt Russell is indeed smoking a Mastro de Paja Il Boia pipe!

Quentin Tarantino didn't choose this pipe at random: Il Boia means "the hangman" in Italian and Kurt Russell plays the role of a hangman in the film. Alberto Montini and his girlfriend couldn't believe it - it was the perfect advert for the Mastro de Paja brand! Today, the Il Boia pipe is still one of Mastro de Paja's best-sellers.

Mastro de Paja pipes, Giancarlo Guidi’s first adventure

Mastro de Paja is the first brand of pipes to be founded in Italy by Giancarlo Guidi. Why "first" you may ask? Quite simply because the master pipe-maker created two brands ten years apart: Mastro de Paja in 1972, then Ser Jacopo in 1982. As you will have gathered from the title of this page, our team at La Pipe Rit is going to focus here on the Mastro de Paja workshop. Initially, Mastro de Paja's reputation was relatively limited, as Giancarlo Guidi struggled to make it known worldwide. It wasn't until the mid-1980s and the arrival of its new director, Alberto Montini, that the company really made its mark around the world.