[2] Due to its extremely high rate of fire, it was nicknamed Pernacchia (literally raspberry, in that context meaning something like fart gun[1]) by its operators.

Sighting was fixed and poor, and it suffered from extreme handling issues during automatic fire due to lack of a stock or any position at which to hold the weapon.

[3] The original patent was filed in April 1914 by Abiel Bethel Revelli, a Piedmontese officer who was active in designing most of the Italian Army's automatic weapons in the early 20th century.

was primarily contracted to manufacture bicycles, but later the Bersaglieri commissioned them to produce automatic weapons designed by Abiel Revelli.

The Italian Air Force (then a wing of the Army) had virtually no machine-guns and a few hundred of the first Villar Perosas were issued to them - giving rise to the myth that it was designed as an aircraft gun.

[4] The weapon was light and easy to transport in the terrain of the Alpine Front, but troops were initially not given training with it and officers had no idea how best to field it.

It was well liked due to its high rate of fire and its weight (it was very light for a support weapon), and went under various modifications: Lt. Col. Giuseppe Bassi personally designed a carrying system (consisting of a leather belt fixed to the handles that was later arranged behind the gunner's neck) to enhance Arditi performances in battle.

[1] In his idea, a section of 8 (later 16) VP machine guns had to support the attack of 20 to 30 Arditi armed with rifles, daggers and hand-grenades, giving adequate suppressive fire and striking the enemy on a psychological level as well.

The Italian government contracted the Canadian General Electric company of Toronto to produce the tripod-mounted Villar Perosas; why Canada was approached is not entirely known.

This version of the Villar Perosa lacked the central sighting ring, and used an elevated fore-sight fixed onto the barrels, with a circular rear-sight above the spade grips.

[1] Some VP machine pistols were equipped with a wooden stock, though the firing mechanism remained unaltered and was not modified in the fashion of, for example, the Carabinetta Automatica O.V.P or the Moschetto Automatico Revelli-Beretta Mod.

[1] The mechanism of the VP was a sound design, and shortly after the end of the war was used as the basis of more practical weapons, such as the Carabinetta Automatica O.V.P and the Moschetto Automatico Revelli-Beretta Mod.

[1] When approached by the SAC over the requirement of a submachine gun by the British Army, the General Headquarters in France responded in late January 1916 with a clear refusal.

[1] Feeling that the M.12/P16 machine pistol was not a suitable counter, the Austro-Hungarians began designing SMGs that would give equivalent performance to the Villar Perosa.

The designs by ŒWG and FÉG centered around the idea of tethering two machine pistols together onto a central mount to mimic the Villar Perosa, but they bore no similarity to the Italian weapon on a technical basis.

[4] Škoda decided that it would be simpler to directly reverse-engineer the Villar Perosa and manufacture a straight copy, which would be almost interchangeable with the original.

One battalion, under a Captain Prasch, reported that only one of the ten guns they received was fully operational,indicating that they may have been rushed into service without proper testing.

Additionally, the capture of some 2,200 Villar Perosas at the Battle of Caporetto, furnished both the Austro-Hungarian and German forces with a large pool of submachine guns to study and, in fact, issue to their own troops.