Savinelli Alligator Green 677 KS, Italy

This reference example documents a Savinelli pipe from the maker's Alligator line, finished in the green colourway and carrying the factory shape designation 677 KS. It is fitted for the 6mm filter system for which Savinelli is particularly known, the house having popularised its own balsa insert as an alternative to conventional paper-and-charcoal filters; the airway also accepts an adaptor for filterless smoking, a flexibility characteristic of the marque's filtered pipes. The example entered the archive as an estate piece, having seen prior use. Savinelli occupies a central place in Italian pipe history. The Alligator series belongs to the company's textured-finish families: the surface is worked into a scaled, reptilian pattern that gives the line its name, offered in several stained colours of which green is one of the most recognisable. Such finishes serve both decorative and practical ends, disguising minor grain irregularities in the while providing a tactile grip. The suffix KS in Savinelli's shape nomenclature denotes King Size, indicating an enlarged rendering of the base shape number — here 677 — within the factory's extensive numbered shape chart, a system Savinelli has maintained consistently across its lines for decades. On the owner's identification and the continuing availability of the Alligator series in recent catalogues, this example is placed broadly within late twentieth to early twenty-first century production, with the precise year undetermined.