Like I said, it's possible that a lot of these classic Italian frames are still made by hand, but I'm sure it's off an assembly line, with five, ten, or even more people having a hand in building the frame. While it's still technically handmade, the appeal for me getting a Mondonico was that I knew that the man who brazed the tubes together in his little garage shop was the man whose name was on the downtube.

Now I know that his son Mauro did some work on it too, and different guys did the chroming and the paint, but this smaller production, low-tech approach to building the frame appealed to me.

Kinda like buying a Sachs.

But with most of the bigger volume manufactureres, you don't really know for certain if it is handmade, or how much work might be done by machines. Or even if it was built in Italy, or imported from Taiwan.