posted by Chelsea2010 on Mar 15
Fabbrica d’Armi Pietro Beretta is an Italian manufacturer of firearms. Its firearms are used worldwide by civilians, police, and armies. It is also known for manufacturing shooting clothes and accessories. Beretta is one of the oldest active firearms manufacturers in the world.
Beretta has been owned by the same family for some five hundred years. The home of Fabbrica D’Armi Pietro Beretta S.p.A. is the village of Gardone, in the center of the northern Italian valley known as Val Trompia. Bartolomeo Beretta was born in 1490. The earliest documentary evidence of his forge is a contract from the Doges of Venice, dated October 3, 1526, for 185 ‘arquebus’ barrels.
The Beretta company was established in 1526, when gunsmith Maestro Bartolomeo Beretta of Gardone Val Trompia (Brescia, Lombardy, Italy) was paid 296 ducats for 185 arquebus barrels by the Arsenal of Venice. The bills of sale for the order of those firearms are in the firm’s archives.
The operation may well pre-date the year 1526 from which the company counts its anniversaries. Since medieval custom dictated that only sons of master craftsmen could become masters themselves, it is also quite possible that Bartolomeo was not the first Beretta to make gun barrels.
Bartolomeo had a son, Jacomo, and a grandson, Giovannino, who became a master gun barrel maker. Another grandson, Lodovico, established a gun lock fabrication trade.
At the middle of the 16th century, Val Trompia had 50 mines, eight smelteries, and 40 smithies. It produced 25,000 guns a year, mostly for export, as well as various other types of iron and steel goods. (During the war between Venice and Turkey in 1570, production more than tripled to 300 weapons per day.)
Giovanni Antonio Beretta designed his own breech-loading cannons in 1641, but it is unclear whether they were ever built. In the late 1600s, the Beretta clan was involved in a deadly feud with the Chinellis that saw one of their members, Francesco Beretta, sentenced to four years of military service. In 1698, the Berettas were the second largest barrel producer among 33 in Gardone, making 2,883 barrels, mostly for long arms.
The Venetian senate sporadically banned the export of gun barrels throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. When it was allowed, high duties slowed sales. The artisans involved in the highly specialized business of making gun barrels were vulnerable to these downturns. During these times, the Republic of Venice went to great lengths to prevent the export of technology.
The guild system began to collapse in the 18th century under pressure from merchants. Interestingly, one of Francesco Beretta’s sons, Giovanni, was a merchant. Gardonese muskets began to wane in popularity in the 1750s, putting more pressure on the guilds to accept the merchants’ economic terms.
When Napoleon took over Venice in 1797, the French outlawed the ‘antidemocratic’ guild system. For the next dozen and a half years, the Berettas made barrels to supply a new firearms factory in nearby Brescia, which produced 40,000 guns a year.
Austria provided a market for military guns after Napoleon was defeated in 1815. The same year, Pietro Antonio Beretta toured Italy, making connections with gun dealers. In 1832, he gave the firm the name it has carried for more than a century and a half: Fabbrica d’Armi Pietro Beretta. After his death, Pietro’s son Giuseppe toured abroad in search of business connections and helped the family operation to produce complete firearms for the first time.
Whereas the previous century had been dominated by military production, in the 1850s Giuseppe Beretta focused the factory on producing fine sporting guns. The company was making at most 300 guns a year through 1860.
Twenty years later, annual production had increased to as many as 8,000 guns a year. Beretta was also marketing, via catalog, guns made by other manufacturers, including Colt, Remington, Smith & Wesson, and Winchester.
Beretta again began making military firearms after the unification of Italy in 1861. In 1899, Giuseppe saw to the construction of the Beretta Hotel in Gardone to accommodate the many foreign visitors the world-renowned factory was receiving.
The second Pietro Beretta has been credited with guiding the firm into the modern era. The 20th century was a time of incredible growth. At the time of Giuseppe Beretta’s death in 1903, the company had 130 employees and a single 10,000-square-foot factory. By 2000, it would occupy 75,000 square feet of space in Gardone and another 50,000 square feet on other sites in Italy, Spain, and the United States (Maryland).
This Pietro Beretta, who succeeded Giuseppe, soon established a hydroelectric plant on the Mella River to supply the factory with its own source of power. During World War I, it developed new arms to use with existing ammunition, designed largely by the firm’s intrepid inventor, Tullio Marengoni.
By the end of the war, Beretta was making more than 4,000 units of Marengoni’s Model 1915 automatic pistol a month for the Italian Army. Marengoni is also said to have designed the world’s first true submachine gun. Employment at Beretta had more than doubled during World War I, to 1,000 workers.
In 1918, the Beretta Model 1918 was the second submachine gun the Italian army fielded. Beretta manufactured rifles and pistols for the Italian military until the 1943 Armistice between Italy and the Allied forces during World War II.
With the Wehrmacht’s control of northern Italy, the Germans seized Beretta and continued producing arms until the 1945 German surrender in Italy. In that time, the exterior finish of the weapons was much inferior to both the pre-war and mid-war weapons, but their operation remained excellent. The last shipment of Type I rifles left Venice for Japan in a U-boat in 1942.
After World War II, Beretta was actively involved in repairing the American M1 Garands given to Italy by the U.S. Beretta modified the M1 into the Beretta BM-59 rifle, which is similar to the M14 battle rifle; armourers consider the BM-59 rifle is thought to be superior, in some ways, to the M14 rifle, because it is more accurate under certain conditions.
After the war, Beretta continued to develop firearms for Italian army and police and for civilian market. In the eighties, Beretta enjoyed a renewal of popularity in North America after its Beretta 92 pistol was selected as service handgun for the United States Army under the designation “M9 pistol”. Beretta acquired several domestic competitors, notably (Benelli, Franchi) and some foreign companies (notably in Finland) in the late eighties.
Beretta is known for its broad range of firearms: side-by-side shotguns, over-and-under shotguns, hunting rifles, express rifles, assault rifles, submachine guns, lever and bolt-action rifles, single and double action revolvers and semi-automatic pistols. The parent company; Beretta Holding, also owns Beretta USA, Benelli, Franchi, SAKO, Stoeger, Tikka, Uberti, the Burris Optics company and a twenty per cent interest of the Browning arms company.
Today, the company is owned and is run by Ugo Gussalli Beretta (a direct descendant of Bartolomeo) and his sons, Franco and Pietro. (The traditional father-to-son Beretta dynasty was interrupted when Ugo Gussalli Beretta assumed the firm’s control; uncles Carlo and Giuseppe Beretta were childless; Carlo adopted Ugo, son of Sister Giuseppina Gussalli, and named him a Beretta.)
Chelsea McVey is a staff writer for the online auction website AuctionArms.com. She enjoys the outdoors and hunting with her dad.
http://shop.auctionarms.com/guns/beretta