To reinforce the comments above. This is part of the email traffic with the Gita rep while I was getting the one bike:

"The Giordana frames were quite nice and, especially the ones built were Excel tubing, were pretty unique and cutting edge for the time. The geometry was dialed in by the owner of Gita with assistance from Dario Pegoretti, who built most of the prototype frames. The head engineer at Excel, Isadoro, was a bit of a “mad scientist” who came up with some wild ideas to try for tubing. Someplace here we have a superlight steel tubeset with a carbon fiber wrap on the inside so it could be welded! Excel had the capability to make one-off tubesets long before anyone else did and were able to do a lot of experimentation. Unfortunately, Isadoro disappeared during a sailing expedition and most of this capability was lost. This was also around the time aluminum frames were becoming commonplace in the peloton and steel was on its way out. There were some truly revolutionary prototypes built about this time that never saw production. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it."
__________________