This Beautiful Beretta Shotgun Honoring Marco Polo Is Up For Grabs
This one-of-kind, handmade shotgun honoring the Italian explorer is equal parts weapon and artwork.
Much like Rolls-Royce’s Bespoke division creates multimillion-dollar one-off automobiles almost entirely from the ground up without a consideration for cost, storied Italian firearms maker Beretta too flexes its creative muscle with singular builds that are equal parts weapon and artwork.
For 2024, Beretta’s annual exercise in unrestrained opulence yielded the Beretta SO Sparviere Marco Polo, currently up for auction through January 31. The trying pan-Asia trek detailed in The Travels of Marco Polo may have taken the famed 13th-century explorer through all kinds of harrowing environments, but this six-figure collector’s piece should seldom exit through the hand-engraved glass doors of its matt-lacquered cabinet. The donor gun is already a doozy—the Beretta SO6 Sparviere is among the most elite in Beretta’s Sovrapposto (SO), or over-under, range of premium sporting shotguns, requiring over 100 hours of master engraving.
The Marco Polo edition ups the hand-engraving man hours several-fold to 1,500, a figure that doesn’t account for the additional 500 hours of work taken up by master gunsmiths and the artisans who carved the grade-5 walnut stock and gun case. The burin-engraved side plates command the eye immediately—the left features a scene from Polo’s hometown of Venice, while the right shows Polo traversing the Mongolian steppes while exploring Asian sights and architecture.
The hammered and punched body of the receiver features several adventurous symbols, including a nautical rutter containing geographic information for maritime navigation and copper-inlayed and enameled compass roses. A copper-inlayed pattern with diamonds and stars covers the trigger guard, forend iron, top lever, top rib, receiver shoulders, safety, bead and the interior of the sideplates, which can be admired thanks to the hand-detachable sidelock action of the SO Sparviere.
Other elements are more directly related to Polo. A copper medallion chiseled with his profile appears on the bottom of the receiver, along with small figures of Polo leaving on a horse and coming back by ship. The top lever features a silver-inlayed winged Lion (the symbol of Venice) and the fret-worked key representing Polo’s sheep, a kind of Asian argali sheep described in The Travels of Marco Polo. The forend release button features a Chinese inscription meaning: “Uniting Europe and Asia as two parts of a single gem.”
There’s no telling how much the Beretta SO Sparviere Marco Polo might fetch. But the Beretta 486 Copernicus, celebrating the 550th birthday of the famed polymath for which the brand’s 2023 celebratory one-off is named, is listed for an eyewatering $550,000. Interested bitters can inquire here.
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