Uberti makes a pretty good gun. It's not quite a Ruger but it's not too far off either. Them and Pietta are the top two Italian outfits. The guns sold under those names (or the various American import houses like EMF importing Piettas, Cimarron, Navy Arms and Taylor's importing Uberti, etc.) are all "no safety guns" - you have to carry them hammer-down-on-an-empty-chamber, loaded "five up".
There's two exceptions:
* Uberti is owned by Beretta, and the Beretta Stampede series has a Ruger-like transfer bar safety. Problem: at least with high round counts, these aren't as reliable as the Ubertis without safeties. Complaints have been made among the cowboy action crowd that the Berettas don't hold up.
* Heritage imports a full-sized variant of the Piettas with transfer bar safeties and does the final finish stateside. Grip frame and finish options are limited at best - no bird's head or Thunderer type grip frames available. It's called the "Big Bore" series, and past the fact that they exist I know little about them.
Are you looking for a Thunderer/Lightning type grip, or a bird's head? There's a difference. The former is derived from a pair of early Colt double action revolvers starting in 1877:
You can get this style of grip frame for Rugers:
http://www.gungrip.com/detail_RBS1__558.html
"Bird's Head" is a period-correct alteration of the Colt SAA grip frame, made by bending and welding the stock grip frame parts originally, producing a very different shape that Ruger has built in the past and is available from Uberti:
http://www.gunblast.com/Birdshead.htm
The BH type handles big recoil better, and will be more comfortable to shoot with "really serious" 357Mag loads such as the very wildest stuff DoubleTap Ammo and Buffalo Bore sell today rivalling the 10mm. And yes, even the Italian guns can cope with at least respectable diets of same in 357.
The Thunderer/Lightning types don't "roll in your hand" as well to absorb the recoil, but are faster shot-to-shot with milder ammo. They'll still feel OK with most 357 loads, starting to hurt a bit as you explore the outer limits of what the 357 can do.
As you can see, a Ruger can be converted to either - get ahold of the old Ruger factory bird's head (which will take some searching!) or buy the aftermarket Thunderer/Lightning type. If you're converting a Ruger that came with a "keylock grip frame" you'll need to buy a new "original Vaquero length" mainspring, mainspring strut and mainspring keeper, all available cheap at Brownells, Midway or the like. This will also ditch the keylock, not that the Ruger keylock is obnoxious.
OK. If you're still stuck on the Italians, lemme tell you the rest of the story.
If your budget allows, the best-looking guns to come out of Italy are from Uberti made to their highest finish level. Under the Uberti brand name this is the "El Patron" model. From Cimarron it's the "Evil Roy", from Taylor's it's the "Smokewagon" and "Running Iron". These are all basically the same gun. The "Evil Roy" is probably the best of those three (and most expensive) as Cimarron does some hand-tuning stateside.
I don't know if that finish level is available in either a Thunderer or BH type grip frame. No idea.
Most of the time, the single best deal on a high-end Italian gun is one of the pre-tuned Longhunters:
http://www.longhunt.com - he's a gunsmith that sells brand new "pre-tuned" guns, plus he weeds out any "birth defect cases".
You'll also want to browse around the Taylor's catalog, see if there's one you like...one thing I noticed is that the short-barrel Bird's Head grip frame variants don't have ejector rods, and I for one don't like that idea at all. I'd rather have a 3.75" barrel instead of a 3.5" and get a usable ejector rod as Ruger typically does on their shorter guns like the now-out-of-production BH Ruger pictured above.
http://www.taylorsfirearms.com/products/cartridgeFirearms.tpl
I suspect Longhunter could get anything in the Taylor's catalog and tune it up for you, and possibly he knows about some options that aren't listed in the online catalog that he could score. If spending $600 for the best (and best looking) Italian gun you can get is in your price range, drop Longhunter a line.
To give you an idea just how fair Longhunter's prices are, here's the lowest you can get a Taylor's Smokewagon for without LH's tuning - note the similarity in price!
http://www.budsgunshop.com/catalog/product_info.php/products_id/60232
A tuned-up gun will feel a LOT better in the cocking and trigger feel department. You won't believe the difference.
In the Piettas the EMF Great Western II series makes the most sense:
http://www.emf-company.com/store/pc/1873-Great-Western-II-Revolvers-c64.htm - they're apparently doing Thunderer types but no BH.
I also have some more notes (mainly on Rugers) here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/gxz11/wanted_reliable_yet_affordable_western_style_six/
For the record: my choice was the Ruger New Vaquero in 357. It's still fundamentally a better gun than anything from Italy and can be tweaked into whatever you want. Of course, I'm now taking "tweaked SA" into a whole new realm...12+ round capacity and quick-change magazines
. It's half done, at least at the "lab experiment level".
