Uberti

On October 14, 1959, an Italian proof house returned the first production sample of a reproduction of the 1851 Colt Navy revolver to a small, new workshop in Gardone Val Trompia, the gunmaking valley outside Brescia. The workshop belonged to Aldo Uberti, a Beretta-trained gunsmith who had spent years polishing stocks and fitting parts before opening his own shop that year to build components for other manufacturers. The Navy revolver was something different. At the request of American importer Val Forgett and his Navy Arms partners, who had identified a market for shootable copies of Civil War-era pistols that had grown too scarce and valuable to fire, Uberti built a working reproduction rather than a display piece. It became the company's actual starting point.

Uberti's approach rested on a simple premise: originals worth collecting were also worth shooting, provided the copy was faithful in more than silhouette. His training under Beretta and at the Zanardelli gunmaking school gave him the tooling background to match dimensions and lockwork, not just outward appearance, and this became the standard the company held to as its range grew from the 1851 Navy into other Colt and Remington percussion patterns, the 1860 Henry rifle, and eventually the Winchester lever guns.

The company's visibility changed in the mid-1960s, when director Sergio Leone came to Gardone Val Trompia for the guns that would appear in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The films put Uberti revolvers in front of an international audience and pulled the business well beyond its original market of collectors and re-enactors. Around the same period, in 1966, by the company's own account, Uberti added a reproduction of the Colt Single Action Army, later sold as the Cattleman. It has since become the most recognizable model in the catalog and, alongside the 1873 Winchester-pattern rifle, a mainstay of the Cowboy Action Shooting sport that took shape in California in the early 1980s and was formalized under the Single Action Shooting Society in 1987.

Aldo Uberti ran the company until his death on March 21, 1998. His sons kept the business operating afterward, and, by the company's own account, it joined the Beretta group in 2000 (some trade references date the purchase to late 1999), an arrangement facilitated by a family connection, since Uberti's wife was related to the Berettas. Beretta financed a move into a new factory building in Gardone Val Trompia in 2002 and added CNC machinery to a production process that had relied heavily on hand-fitting. Uberti remains at that address today, operating within the Beretta group alongside Benelli, with US sales and distribution handled through Benelli USA in Accokeek, Maryland.

For a collector, Uberti occupies an unusual position: a manufacturer built entirely around firearms whose originals are otherwise locked away in museums or advanced collections, bought by its customers as often to be fired as to be displayed. Alongside the Cattleman, the catalog now runs from Walker and Dragoon-pattern percussion revolvers through Schofield-style top-breaks and lever and single-shot rifles up to the 1894. Uberti also supplies frames, cylinders, and barrels to other firearms brands, including Beretta, Taurus, and Cimarron Firearms. Its guns have appeared on screen well beyond the Leone films, in Westerns from True Grit to Tombstone, and remain a standard reference point for re-enactors and Old West shooting sports.