Axe with slip-through handle.

An Italian axe with a handle that slips through the eye like a tomahawk or pickaxe.

Interesting. One wonders why that approach is not more common.

In Italy and France it's the traditional method!

The advantages are that it's easier to replace the handle when broken, allows the use of multiple lengths of handle interchangeably with the same head, and allows for the use of the head alone as its own tool for certain tasks. The advantage of the wedged handle style is that you can make the handle pretty much any shape you want. Both are great depending on what you want to do with the tool, but the slip-fit handle style isn't common in the USA at this time, except in tomahawks, pickaxes, and eye hoes (which are uncommon tools in the modern age in themselves.)

Did not know it as a continental tradition. Not familiar with the eye hoe, but I've thrown my share of hawks and my pick axe is sitting around here someplace.

Are these posted on your site?

Yes they are. Out of the smallest size right now, but the others are available.

Eye hoes are fantastic tools and knock the stuffing out of the flimsy garden variety. In addition to digging trenches with mine I use it in the winter to knock down the wall of ice that builds up from the plows going by. Chops right through it!

Hi Benjamin,

How certain are you that this is an "Italian" ax?

Do you know where the original forms of these traditional iron tools originated?

They are indeed wonderful and have many advantages over "Western" style chopping and adzing tools. There are "shaped handle" styles...but that is a hint to there original origins...

j

Jay C. White Cloud wrote:Hi Benjamin,

How certain are you that this is an "Italian" ax?

Do you know where the original forms of these traditional iron tools originated?

They are indeed wonderful and have many advantages over "Western" style chopping and adzing tools. There are "shaped handle" styles...but that is a hint to there original origins...

j

Well, I'm interested in hearing what you're getting at, but I'm absolutely certain that it's an Italian axe. It's made in Italy (by that virtue alone it's Italian!) but the name of the pattern comes from the region in Italy which the pattern was developed (Calabria.)

I sure many of our readers are loosely familiar with the Venetian Marco Polo and his ties to the "Silk Road." This trade with the Middle East and Asia during his time and most probably for millennia before contributed to the foundation forms of many aspects of Europe and Western culture. Italy then and even today still has strong trade ties and emulation of vernacular forms in many items both architecturally and within tools. The company "Falci" as I have been informed from sources in Japan still has dealings with many foundries and Smiths in Miki City (an epa center of blacksmithing and tool manufacture.)

The axe in the photo may well have been "finished" and "tempered" in Italy...no doubt, yet there is a good chance that its blank came from Japan or China, as this still today is a standard form of "chopping tool" in Asia as this style has been for perhaps over 3000 years. Fine forging seems to have moved from the Middle East and then into Asia reaching several zeniths like the Samurai and tool making blacksmiths of the Ryukyu Islands and in the Shang dynasties of China, of course then moving back into the West for further regional stylizations. Notable of these are those of the Swiss perhaps the oldest other that far eastern Europe with the oldest of specific regional metal working traditions...

Rinaldi is the manufacturer, and does all of their forging in-house. In fact, they are the manufacturer of many of Falci's axes. Falci and other companies do use foreign components on some products, or even wholly foreign manufacture (I have a Falci fruit picker, for instance, that was made in China) but the outsourcing work mostly revolves around items that are't part of their core competency. I suspect that the Japanese connection with Falci is more likely for saw blades, and possibly for pruning shears/loppers. Their shovels, axes, scythes, sickles, billhooks, etc. are all domestic manufacture.