I bought my road frame from Sierra in 2003, and it came in a box packed with the bewb page from a newspaper in Turin. I guess Sierra bought up some distributor's entire stock of Italian aluminum frames when everyone went CF. It took the next 8 months to acquire all the parts in various sales (and the tools to install them), but when all was said and done I had a hell of a sweet ride for not a whole lot of cash (a big consideration at the time, since 2003 was the year we bought our house).
Come to think of it, my Marin assault bike came from Sierra as well, and only required some minor tweaking of the disc brakes (and the addition of a pair of pedals) right out of the box. I probably put 15-20k miles on that thing without a problem other than the occasional puncture and having to repack the headset once.
Sierra has some amazing deals.