My wife just paid $1400 for a pristine Cologno Arabesque in blue, and with all Dura Ace (12 speed indexed). The stem is pantographed and the seat is white Cinneli Volore SLX (my fave). It's a 54 x 54 so thankfully we can fit her on the bike. So many mens bikes are a cm or two longer in the top tube than the seat, making it almost impossible to fit a woman on the bike, with their long legs and shorter torso. (Salsa short and shallow bars come with only an 8 mm reach instead of the usual 11, so that you save 3 cm right there without having to ditch a nice or special stem). But I digress...
The owner called us up on the phone and spent quite a while describing how he intends to ship, every defect we will see, however small, and how if we have any regrets, he will just cancel the sale, no hard feelings. He then said that he would happily take the bike back and refund our money, if for any reason the bike is unsuitable. He has an Arabesque frame, never built up in white that he bought in Italy for the equivalent of $1800, and has a nice collection of 30 bikes that he is starting to thin out (62 years old, wife complains etc.. etc...). It sure makes it easier to shell out some big bucks to someone who is so pleasant and loving of his old bikes. Check out his Eisentraut and his Rossin in Ebay now. BTW, both my Gios Torino and Allez are in the machine shop to have the seat tubes machined out. I tried 4 or 5 of the 20 or so methodologies kindly suggested to me by list members, and my hands still smell like ammonia and lye, and my arms are tired from endless internal sawing.
Thanks again to all. Garth Libre in Miami Fl.