[1] At the end of 1916, Major Bethel-Abiel Revelli - designer of the Villar Perosa - demonstrated a new weapon to the Department of Air Artillery which was called the Carabinetta Automatica O.V.P..

[4] The OVP was little more than the barrel and action of the VP attached to a wooden buttstock and provided with a trigger and some small refinements.

[5] An unusual feature of the OVP that was not on the original VP gun was the use of a cylindrical sleeve surrounding the receiver for cocking the weapon.

Another oddity, this time carried over from the VP, was the provision of a slot in the rear edge of the top mounted magazine that allowed the firer to see how many rounds remained inside it.

It is not known whether the prototype tested in 1916 and early 1917 was built with the unusual features seen on the patent sketch, but in any case the final production model was not.

Purchases of C96 copies from other countries, including China, managed to ward off the adoption of the O.V.P until May 1918, when it officially came into service as the C96's replacement.

The army held their own separate submachine gun trials which compared designs by Beretta, Ansaldo, SIAI Savoia, Cei-Rigotti, and A.N.

It was used in small numbers by some Italian units in the Western Desert in 1941, but generally the weapon was phased out by the superior Beretta 38.