On the 3rd of October 1526, a clerk at the Arsenal of Venice wrote out a receipt.
296 ducats for 185 arquebus barrels. Paid to a gun-barrel maker in a valley above Brescia, one Bartolomeo Beretta.
That scrap of paper is still in the Venetian archives. Last Saturday, five hundred years to the day, the company it started turned 500.
Most family firms don't survive the third generation. Beretta is on the fifteenth, and the sixteenth is already at work. Today, the company is run by Pietro and Franco Gussalli Beretta. Same surname. Same valley. And they still make the guns where Bartolomeo lit the forge.
Think about what that receipt, and the company, has outlived: The Republic of Venice. The Spanish Empire. Napoleon. The British Empire. Two world wars. The Soviet Union.
No other industrial family, they say, has run a business for five centuries without a break.
And this year, some limited-edition anniversary guns are numbered 1,526, the year on the receipt.
What it boils down to is this: a man took an order, did the work, and taught his son. Then his son did the same. Fifteen times.
Now that's a family legacy!
To the Berettas 🥂