Tag Archives: Prince Amedeo

How to make friends and influence people

This beautiful .380ACP Beretta M1934 is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum and was captured somewhere in Africa in WWII.

Beretta M1934 (FIR 3708) The Beretta M1934 was the most successful of a series of pistols produced by Beretta for the Italian Army. It was designed by Beretta’s chief designer, Tullio Marengoni, in response to a military decision to replace all existing service pistols with a single new model. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30035917

This example has grip plates decorated with the monogram of the Prince Amedeo, 3rd Duke of Aosta, who was the Viceroy of Italian East Africa (modern-day Somalia, Eritrea and, from 1938, Ethiopia). Several other examples of these monogrammed weapons are known, so it is probably that they were intended as gifts to be given by Aosta to friendly local tribal leaders, because who doesn’t want a nice Beretta?

As for the Duke? In 1941, Amedeo was captured after he surrendered the mountain fortress of Amba Alagi in Northern Ethiopia to the Allies and, interned in a POW camp in Kenya, died of tuberculosis the next year, age 43.