The collector behind MatchMyGun

Three rooms, three doors

I was born in Rome in 1969; when I was five my family moved south, into my paternal grandparents' house, and it is there that this site really begins.

My grandfather was a captain of infantry in the Italian Army during the Second World War, and every one of my forebears before him had been a soldier — most of them hunters as well. His house was a large manor with a great many hectares around it; on the ground floor were three rooms, divided from one another by three doors, and each of them held an armoury that had collected over generations: sabres and swords, a few pieces of armour, crossbows, and all of my grandfather's rifles, together with the reloading equipment for 12 bore, 20 bore and others.

I was six when he taught me to clean his hunting guns, and I can still remember the smell of the oil we used on them.

“Shoot at what you know, and at what you can see clearly”

I started hunting with him at seven, and at eleven I was given my first rifle — a 9mm Flobert, registered on my grandfather's licence — which I remember holding and touching with real admiration.

The instruction that came with it was severe: you never point a weapon at anything, you carry it pointing up or pointing down, you never assume that a gun is unloaded, and your finger never rests on the trigger. Growing up, I found that plenty of enthusiasts — people who competed, even — did not keep to those rules as strictly as I had kept to them since I was a child.

The lesson I remember best was also the sharpest. The first time I fired without looking properly at a bird on the wing, my grandfather took the rifle out of my hands and gave me a heavy slap. No. You shoot at what you know, and at what you can see clearly.

There was a rule for the day itself, too: in the morning it was decided whether we were hunting hare or hunting fox, and for the rest of that day, for no reason at all, nothing else was shot. If you went out for fox, you hunted fox.

They are good memories — getting up at four while it was still dark, preparing the dogs and loading them into the cars: my grandfather's hunting friends looked on me as a sort of mascot.

Why I stopped, and why I came back

When I was twelve we returned to the city, to Rome, and the first time I saw hunters firing beside a motorway something in me closed: men walking across ploughed fields where there was nothing, shooting at whatever birds flew over, without mercy. It did not feel like the world my grandfather had taught me, so I decided not to take out a hunting licence; and for years I did not touch a weapon, except when I visited him on holiday in the south, where I could appreciate those days again.

Later I did my military service in the Navy, and there I took firearms up again and the passion came back strongly. But since a licence is not easy to obtain in Italy, I kept it at the level of theory — reading, researching, learning: a virtual collector, in a manner of speaking.

Then I moved abroad, where I could take it up properly again with a licence of my own, and the admiration came back as it had always been — for these magnificent mechanical creations of man.

I have never seen a firearm as a thing of offence, nor of defence: to me it is no different from owning a car — I don't want to hurt somebody with it. Things do not harm people; people do. I do not believe in prohibiting firearms, but I understand that anyone who has never handled or owned one may hold a completely opposite view, and I have no quarrel with that.

I do remember the first day I was granted my licence. I put my Ruger .380 into the front pocket of my trousers, and then I stopped, because something had become clear to me: from that day on I could not afford a single ordinary moment of bad temper. At a junction, when another car does not stop, everyone reaches out of the window and makes a gesture. Everyone — except a man carrying a pistol in his pocket. Carrying a weapon is a responsibility, and it also gives you a kind of power over other people; but before anything else you have to understand that the power is not free, and that its price is your own temper, every day, for as long as you carry it.

What I do for a living

I have spent my working life as a programmer, and that is the other half of why this site exists. When I came back to firearms, I went looking for the tools I wanted and could not find them anywhere: a way to date a gun from its serial number that also tells you which chart the answer came from; a way to see whether a cartridge will actually chamber in a given gun; a reference that says where a maker's factory records are held, in the cases where they survived at all. Because I write software for a living, I did not have to wait for somebody else to build them.

And I do not expect to finish. This is a piece of work with no last page: every set of factory records that resurfaces, every marking that finally gets documented, every error a reader takes the trouble to report, goes back into it and makes it better than it was. That is the part of it I enjoy most.

Why this site exists

I did not build this site to sell firearms, or to argue that they should be unregulated. I built it for one reason, which is a memory: my grandfather, who taught me to love these things, and to respect nature with them.

That is why I see MatchMyGun as a collector's site: a place to keep a historical memory of firearms, of what they are, when they were made, what the marks on them mean, and who kept the records. No firearms are offered for sale here, and nothing on this site is for sale.

And there is one rule I brought with me from that house in the south; it is the only editorial standard this site really has.

Shoot at what you know, and at what you can see clearly.

In practice that means only what can be sourced: if a date cannot be traced to a published record, this site says so instead of guessing; if a manufacturer has no documented history, it gets no entry; and every serial lookup result names the chart it came from, so that you can check it yourself.

My grandfather would not have accepted anything less.

About Cristiano