Tonino Jacono began his pipe-making career in Calabria in 1981, with his father-in-law — who worked in the local briar mill — both sourcing blocks and drilling stummels, and his brother — who had sourced the equipment — shaping them. By 1983, the fledgling artisan had returned home to Jesi, in the Marche region (also home to the famed Pesaro), and set up a tiny shop in his home. Whether it was due to his initial start in Calabria or just due to his independent, self-reliant nature though, Tonino's style remains firmly in the neoclassical realm of exaggerated shape chart classics, despite his proximity to Pesaro and the aesthetic school that sprung from it.

From the onset, Jacono had two goals from which he never wavered: produce excellent smoking instruments, and do so at extremely fair prices. In many ways Jacono remains "old school," in the most charming sense of the phrase. He still works in that tiny shop, still sources his briar from the same source in Calabria — a source shared by Claudio Cavicchi — and still does everything by hand, from painstaking rustication to drilling out his own stems and even inlaying them with his logo.