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Gunmakers have a tendency to follow current trends and borrow design elements from other successful brands, so it’s refreshing when a novel idea arises. One of the most unique over/under shotguns in some time is Beretta’s new Ultraleggero (Italian for Ultralight), which cuts weight to an absolute minimum without sacrificing durability or performance.

Ultralight upland guns are hardly new, and this isn’t the first lightweight over/under that Beretta has offered. However, this gun does use a different recipe for reducing mass than other brands. Traditionally, shotgun manufacturers swapped out steel receivers for aluminum alloy receivers and much of the weight shaving was accomplished. With the Ultraleggero, Beretta decided to approach the problem from a different angle: leave just as much steel as is necessary to make the gun safe and reliable and fill in the gaps with something even lighter than aluminum.

Ultraleggero guns begin with a Beretta 690 boxlock action that is trimmed and cut down to minimal size and weight. That trimming left some gaps on the sides of the receiver which Beretta has filled with 3-D printed black polymer inserts with scroll engraving. Before you gasp at the thought of a Beretta over/under with cheap plastic parts, understand that this is still a family-owned brand with over 500 years of experience making guns. This isn’t some equity firm, save-a-few-bucks plastic insert. It looks good. It looks natural. It looks way, way better than poor laser engraving or (now would be the appropriate time to gasp) the cheap faux gold game scenes that have adorned some of history’s more unsightly stackbarrels. I’ve seen those, and yes, they were ugly. This is not. The Ultraleggero’s side panels aren’t prone to cracking, breaking, or scratching, and if they do, they are fast, simple, and cheap to replace.

There’s another advantage to having affordable, easily replaceable side panels on a shotgun receiver: They’re easy to customize. Just as we slap bumpers stickers of every road race run, National Park visited, and breed of dog owned on our pickups, so can you customize your Ultraleggero. Want to swap out the floral design for straight black or game scene panels? You can do just that, and at a low cost and in a matter of minutes. Beretta promises that more Ultraleggero interchangeable plate options will follow, and eventually the company plans to allow buyers to create their own logos that can be 3-D printed onto the side panels of the gun and shipped directly to their door.

The option to customize the side panels of a shotgun makes sense on many levels. First, what self-respecting gun club or upland preserve doesn’t want to offer Beretta rental/loaner guns that bear the brand logo on both sides? High school and college shooting teams can add their school’s name and logo, and breeders can add their kennel name to the side of their gun. You can even have the likeness of your favorite hunting dog, child, spouse, best friend, or mailman embellished on the side of your gun. The creative possibilities are endless.

The Ultraleggero: a Working Gun That Works

Skeletonized receivers and interchangeable side panels are clever add-ons, but the Ultraleggero is a gun that is built with the dedicated upland hunter in mind. A seasoned dog handler once told me that there’s great bird hunting all across this country, but none of it is close to the road or parking lot. Indeed, serious hunters know that bagging a lot of birds usually means walking many miles, much of it through thick brush and timber and over uneven rocks. And, during the course of a typical day, you’ll walk a few miles for every shot you take. To that end, Beretta has trimmed gun weight on the 12-gauge Ultraleggero to just 6.4 pounds for the 12-gauge/26-inch barrel model, and 6.6 pounds for the 12-gauge/28-inch gun. That makes the UltraLeggero the lightest steel frame 12-gauge over/under ever available.

The recoil pad is light and thin, and the wooden buttstock has some of the walnut inside trimmed away to cut mass. A short, rounded forearm with minimal metal moving parts also helps keep weight down, and it appears as though the midrib has been deleted (although there are rib portions at the front and rear of the barrels to ensure longevity and durability. The gun comes with a 6mm top rib and a matte finish on the walnut stock that looks good with the subdued blueing and black insert panels.

The Beretta faithful will feel right at home behind this gun, which comes with a single selective trigger, and the traditional tang safety with integral barrel selector. Selective auto ejectors also come standard, which isn’t required on a field gun but is nonetheless a nice addition. The test gun that I held at the 2023 SHOT Show (a 12-gauge, 26-inch gun) balanced beautifully. The reduction of weight in the receiver and corresponding trimming down of the forearm and midrib weight makes the gun balance right at the front of receiver, where it should. The Steelium Optima Bore HP barrels are threaded for chokes, and these guns come with five Optima chokes in a blue Beretta ABS case.

MSRP for the Ultraleggero is $2,999, which places it in close approximation with other quality ultralight 12-gauge over/unders. All of these guns are within a few ounces of one another, and all offer the type of fit and finish you’d expect from guns of this class. The Beretta is the only one in the mix that utilizes a steel framework with polymer plates instead of aluminum alloy.

Is the Beretta Ultraleggero the Gun for Me?

Let’s be clear: This gun is light, and light guns kick. I’ve shot a lot of six-pound 12-gauge over/unders and none of them were soft shooters. The Beretta comes with a very thin black recoil pad that the brand calls Extralight, but you can ditch that in favor of a more formidable recoil pad if you’d like. It’ll add a bit of weight, but a longer pad will also add to this gun’s 14.75- inch length of pull. If you’re a small-statured shooter adding a beefy pad to this gun might make it too long to shoot effectively.

Personally, I love the way that this gun balances and handles. I also like the idea of using steel over aluminum. Perhaps that makes me a purist, but even as a self-proclaimed purist, the black polymer panels in the side of the gun don’t put me off. I’ll admit that I thought they would, and when I heard that Beretta was planning to add these panels to their 690 frame, I felt a tinge of fear that this gun could have been a huge flop. In truth, I doubt that most shooters—even some who have experience in the field and who have shot many shotguns—will assume that the panels are indeed some type of metal. This skeletonized frame/polymer side panel experiment could have gone very badly had it not been a Beretta creation. As it stands, the Ultraleggero is a gun that is functional and handsome at the same time. It is the epitome of an understated field gun whose beauty lies in its simple yet elegant design. No one builds those type of guns better than Beretta.

If you shoot ninety percent of your shells at clay targets this is, quite frankly, not the gun for you (but do check out Beretta’s 686 Silver Pigeon I Sporting and A400 Xcel Sporting, soft shooting guns that cost less than the Ultraleggero). However, if you are a dedicated wild bird hunter who walks many miles a year and doesn’t want to put up with the bulk of a target gun, then the Ultraleggero is perfect. This gun comes with a 3-inch chamber, which is standard operating procedure these days, but why you’d ever use anything more than a magnum 2 3⁄4-inch load in this gun is beyond me.

As stated, this steel/polymer experiment could have gone very badly and ruined the industry on the concept. Beretta managed to pull it off beautifully, though, and I fully expect to start seeing custom Ultraleggeros at gun clubs and hunt lodges around the country; conservation organizations chapters will almost certainly start customizing these guns and giving them away as well. But there’s one looming question that remains: When will we get a five-and-a-half-pound 20-gauge version to complement the 12-gauge model? Sooner rather than later, I hope.