Art-Deco V. Bernadelli .22 Target Pistol: Still cool after all these years

It's an unusual week when I work two days on posting guns on gunbroker for the gun shop where I work without finding more than a few guns that I just can't live without.

But unless something happens tomorrow, I will have gone an entire week without buying a gun. Egads!

Seriously, I don't buy guns that often but mainly it's because I don't have enough money to buy everything I want.

But this week is unusual because the one gun among the 28 I've listed that I'd most like to have is an Italian-made V. Bernadelli .22 target pistol.

The first V. Bernadelli pistol I ever saw was a .32 ACP I listed last week and it sold within a day or two. Then the crew came back from last weekend's gun show with a box full of trade-ins and purchases that included another V. Bernadelli, the unknown .22LR model at right.

BlueBook is no help in definitively determining the model and there's no model marking on the pistol, which is fairly common with older and even some newer European manufacturers.

Whatever it is, it's got a sort of Buck Rogers art deco look and the grips fit my hand really well. If it's still there tomorrow, I may just sneak it out of the shop and take it for a test run this weekend, assuming the shop isn't open Saturday and I'm not working. The jury is still undecided on that. We're a mom and pop gun store and mom and pop won't decide whether we open on Saturday until the last minute.

I really don't need another .22 pistol, I've got a Dan Wesson revolver, a S&W 22A-1 and two Sig .22 pistols, P220 and P229 slide conversions.

But this Bernadelli is pretty cool and I do like those fiber-optic front sights, like I have on my Smith 22A-1. They sure work good for these aging eyes. I'm pretty sure the red fiber-optic front sight with the thumb-screw barrel band wasn't standard on this Bernadelli, and maybe not the wood grips with no logos. Surely the jeweled trigger, jeweled chamber and extractor show the work of a gunsmith somewhere in its history.

It's stamped "1951" so that may be the date of manufacture, but it has an improbably low serial number, 517, so who knows how old this little pistol is? But the price is pretty reasonable...