Carlo Ponti (photographer)

Ponti opened an optician's shop in Piazza San Marco 52,[4][5] near the Caffè Florian,[6] producing high quality instruments, for which he had sole rights, for astronomy and physics and photographic lenses, especially those used for panoramas, as well as selling products of other companies.

The prestige of his royal appointment brought further business in other cities including Paris, London, Liverpool, Berlin, Stuttgart, Lyons, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Montreal, and San Francisco.

[3] Ponti was an inventor of a sophisticated version of the peep show, the alethoscope (from the Greek “true”, “exact” and “vision”) in 1860 which he presented to the Société française de photographie in 1861, then in April, to the Istituto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, earning an honourable mention there in May.

Ponti's success benefitted from his familiarity with, and repetition of, traditional painted views, and his distribution network through commercial studios beyond Venice, including that of Francis Frith in the United Kingdom and Pompeo Pozzi in Milan.

[6] Ponti's rights to these devices lapsed after 1866, due to administrative confusion after the Third Italian War of Independence, when Venice, along with the rest of the Veneto, became part of the newly created Kingdom of Italy.

Despite Ponte's legal battles between 1868 and 1876 to prevent it, Carlo Naya began to manufacture and sell the Aletoscopio, which Ponti tried to counter by issuing variations of the instrument under other names including Amfoteroscopio, Dioramoscopio, Pontioscopio, Cosmorama Fotografico.