A F.lli Bertuzzi Twenty-Bore, Built on the Boss System:
The Coronet and the Rose…
Twenty-bore · over-and-under · sidelock · engraved by Ferraglio · Gardone Val Trompia, 2000
An Imagined Journey
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There is a moment, on a high September morning, when the bird is still only a thought — a dark mark lifting over the brow of the hill, carried sideways on a wind that has been building since first light. The loader’s hand finds your shoulder. You do not look down at the gun. You have stopped needing to. It comes up the way water finds its level, the muzzles already moving before the mind has finished its arithmetic, six pounds and twelve ounces of walnut and steel that weighs, in the hands, like nothing at all and like everything that has ever been made well.
It is a small gun for a large morning. A twenty-bore, where the men on either side of you carry twelves, and yet the bird folds cleanly against the cloud and the second barrel is never needed, and the empty case turns lazily in the air behind you as the action falls open. You break it across your arm to reload, and the low sun runs along the bright action and catches, on the underside of the forend, a small inlay worked into the chequering in gold. A coronet set above an ornament of scroll and leaf, the kind of mark a man asks for when the gun is to be wholly his own.
Someone ordered this gun — not bought it from a rack, but ordered it, to these dimensions, with this wood, with that coronet on the forend, in the way a man does when he means a gun to be his for life and to outlast him. He chose well, and he chose people who knew their work: two brothers in a workshop in the Italian Alps who built the action, and an engraver named Ferraglio who covered every surface of it in roses. To understand what he commissioned, you have to take the gun apart in your mind and look at it a piece at a time.
Begin, as the gun does, with the valley.
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I. The Valley and the Brothers
