Google Italian proof house date codes and you can find tables going back to 1945. Look at an Italian-manufactured gun and you will see the letter sequences appear in a little rectangle near the proof information.
To make complete sense of thing you need a table of letters and years. Officials in the Italian proof house in Gardone Val Trompia, near Brescia, choose to miss out other letters, some for logical reasons (for instance, O and Q could easily be mistaken for zero) and others for no apparent reason (G and R, for instance). The Italian alphabet contains only 21 letters, there being no k, j, w, x, or y. Miroku of Japan, who make the traditionally-styled break-action Brownings, have adopted Browning’s date coding system in their serial numbers. Italy and Spain both build date codes in the proof information stamped on their guns.
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So what’s the answer? You need to know how to read the different proof marks on guns to discover how old a gun is. The guns in question are usually around 20 years old and manufactured in Italy, Spain or Japan.