I worked in a large family-owned sporting goods business in the Washington DC metro area in the early 1970s, at the time when Ithaca began to import the Perrazzi into the US. We were a major Browning, Winchester, Ithaca and Remington dealer, and at that time the darling of the trapshooting world was the Browning Superposed Broadway Trap, which outsold anything else close to it by about a 6 to 1 margin.
When prospective buyers that had heard about the Perazzi Competition Trap guns came in to look at them, they always complained that they were too much money: "Why would I pay $600 (the price of a Comp 1 trap) for a relatively unknown gun when I can buy a Broadway for $475 (Browning's discounted price at the time)?? I would always reply; "Well sir, its your choice: pay your $ and take your pick!" Within 3-4 years, Perazzi began to completely dominate the trap gun market.
As an aside, the Perazzi Comp 1 was the only 32-inch barreled gun I was ever able to handle effectively. Being of medium build with fairly short arms, other guns seemed too hard to control at the end of a swing on angled targets. With their individually tapered barrels, the 32" Comp 1s were ideal for me. When I began to shoot bunker (Olympic) trap competitively in 1990, I found we had an old Comp 1 at our club that had been sold and resold to at least 4 members over a 20-year period. To the best recollection of the surviving owners keeping records of their reloading for practice as well as their competition rounds, they figured the gun had had a minimum of 250,000 rounds through it. I would love to have that gun today.
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