Italy

Val Trompia’s iron and manganese deposits and its streams supported metalworking from the Middle Ages.¹ In workshops along the watercourses, water wheels drove the forge hammers and bellows.¹ A dispatch of 1459 records an order to produce firearms for the Venetian Republic, and in 1526 Bartolomeo Beretta of Gardone supplied 185 harquebus barrels to the Venice Arsenal.^{2, 3, 4, 5}

The trade grew through specialised workshops, family ties and guilds, in a network centred on Gardone that extended down the Mella River to Brescia.⁶ Gardone made the barrels, while Marcheno, Sarezzo and Lumezzane supplied the gunlocks.⁷ In Brescia, engravers and etchers decorated stocks and barrels for wealthy civilian customers.⁸ The family workshops trained apprentices under a master gunsmith.⁹

Orders for barrels rose with Venetian military expansion and fell in peacetime.¹⁰ Venice protected the trade, but that protection could also keep its workshops from finding other buyers when government orders declined.¹¹ In 1588 Venetian funds supported warehouses in Gardone that bought raw iron for the masters and stored finished goods until orders arrived.¹¹ In 1627 the Republic forbade Gardone’s masters to teach barrel manufacture to anyone from outside Val Trompia.¹² Gardone’s workers formed the Collegio delle Maestranze in 1726, and in 1740 the Senate reserved the trade in barrels and accessories to the college and placed quality under a procurator’s supervision.¹³

The political change of 1797 brought local arms production into France’s military organisation.¹⁴ Viceroy Eugenio Beauharnais visited the district on 29 December 1806 and then decided to open a royal arsenal in Brescia with a base in Gardone.¹⁴ In 1818 the Austrian authorities suspended production at Gardone’s state factory, reduced it to a store and transferred military contracts to merchant-entrepreneurs.^{15, 16} Vittorio Emanuele II reopened the arsenal as the Fabbrica Erariale di Brescia in 1859, and the Kingdom of Italy revived the local arsenal sites and introduced new production technology.^{17, 16}

Private firms also brought the separate stages of manufacture together to make complete firearms, with Bernardelli following Glisenti and Beretta.¹⁸ Beretta introduced steam machinery in the nineteenth century but kept handwork for critical assembly and finishing.¹⁹ The First World War increased production sharply; peace brought contraction and long delays in adopting newer production methods.²⁰ During the Second World War the large firms concentrated production through mechanisation and integration, and hunting-gun manufacture disappeared from the district.²¹ In 1945 the end of military contracts brought Gardone and the neighbouring villages close to industrial collapse.²²

Hunting and sporting shotguns then gave the district a new market and a means of recovery.²³ Side-by-sides led the recovery in the 1950s, and over-and-unders led local production in the 1960s.²⁴ New workshops and small companies multiplied in those decades and formed a decentralised system for making hunting and sporting guns.²⁵ Barrel makers, polishers, chequerers, engravers and assemblers worked both inside factories and as independent subcontractors.²⁶ At Beretta and Bernardelli, profitable military contracts also financed investment in the 1950s that benefited civilian manufacture.²⁷

Foreign markets helped the sector revive as Italy joined NATO in 1949 and GATT in 1950.²⁸ During the 1960s the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom took more than 70 per cent of Brescia’s civilian firearm exports.²⁹ In the early 1960s ArtArm began organising small gunmakers for overseas sales, first to Greece.³⁰ Its successor became the Community of Small Gunmakers in 1970 and a consortium in 1975.³¹

Benelli Armi was founded in Urbino in 1967, and its plant was built and began production in 1968.^{32, 33} Benelli’s 2024 report records a further 1,000 square metres repurposed for manufacturing.³⁴ In 2023, according to ANPAM’s December 2024 release, exports took 87 per cent of the industrial production value of civilian sporting, hunting and personal-defence arms and ammunition.^{35, 36}