A VENZI-Signed Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-Bore

An Imagined Journey

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In a narrow valley north of Brescia, where the Mella runs cold off the Alps and men have cut and blued steel since before there were nations to sell it to, a blank of walnut is turned in the light. Someone is looking for the figure — the dark river of grain that will, one winter morning years from now, catch a low December sun. The blank is set aside. It has been chosen.

A few benches away, an action no larger than a man’s palm is taking shape under the file. It is being made small on purpose, scaled down so faithfully to its gauge that the finished gun will weigh less than six pounds and still lock up like the door of a vault. There is no hurry here. The valley has had five hundred years to learn that haste is the enemy of a best gun, and it has forgotten nothing.

When the metalwork is right, the action travels a short distance to another bench, and another man bends over it with a loupe screwed into his eye. He works in silence, a fine graver tapping at the steel — not cutting so much as drawing, building a woodcock out of the valley’s grey light one fine line at a time, until the bird seems to lift off the floor plate under its own power. Around it, scroll begins to flow like water finding its level. At the last, a sliver of gold is let into the steel and burnished until it glows: a small crown, no taller than a fingernail, the old mark of the very best a house can make.

And then, at last, the gun goes where all of this was always pointed. A frosted edge of cover on an upland morning, breath showing, dogs working ahead. A bird gets up hard and the gun comes to the shoulder before the mind has fully caught up — light, quick, alive in the hands in a way no heavy gun ever is. One report rolls across the field. Afterward the gun goes back into its leather case, into the green baize cut exactly to its shape, and waits for the next morning as patiently as it waited to be born.

The gun in the case is a Beretta SO9 EELL in 20-bore, weighing five pounds and fourteen ounces, its locks signed by the master engraver Silvano Venzi. It is, by a number of measures, about as close as a production house has ever come to the platonic ideal of the small-bore game gun. This is its story.

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To understand why a gun like this matters, you have to understand that Beretta has always made two kinds of gun: the ones that come off the line in the thousands, and the ones that do not. The SO sidelock belongs entirely to the second kind. Sovrapposto — “superimposed,” the Italian term for an over-and-under — gives the line its initials, but the letters that follow are what tell you where you are standing. An SO is a true full-sidelock best gun, built by hand in a dedicated custom department at Gardone Val Trompia, apart from the factory that makes everything else.