On 22 March 1963, Pietta Giuseppe was founded in Gussago, in the province of Brescia. It made shotgun parts. Its founder, born there in 1938, was the seventh of nine siblings, son of a Tempini worker; at fourteen he was already working in a small firearms factory in Collebeato while studying technology and mechanics at night school.

In 1965 his gunsmith brother joined him and they formed Fratelli Pietta. They stopped making parts alone and began buying components to assemble complete shotguns: the first left the workshop in April 1966 and sold the following month for 30,000 lire, a 12-bore over-and-under and the first firearm bearing their name. They made 156 that year; more than a thousand the following year. The workshop occupied seventy square metres in Via Briglia.

The change came from France. A customer receiving their first order in 1967 introduced an entrepreneur looking for a factory able to reproduce historical American models. The first order was for 10,000 units of the 1851 Navy. “That order completely changed the direction of the factory”, Giuseppe Pietta said: they stopped assembling firearms and began manufacturing them. An American order for seven thousand pieces followed when monthly output was four hundred reproductions, not only of the 1851 Navy but of the Colt Army, Remington, Paterson and Le Mat. “We wondered whether the order was real.”

In 1974 the company began making revolvers and specialised in historical reproduction. The rest is continuity: the brothers separated in 1978 and the factory remained with Giuseppe and his wife Elisabetta; in 1985 the Houston chamber of commerce awarded them; in 1995 they moved to their present three thousand square metres with thirty workers. Their children run it today: Alberto, born in 1968, handles the technical side, and Alessandro the commercial side.