The Variara submachine gun (in Italian Mitra Variara) is an insurgency weapon clandestinely designed and made by the Italian Resistance, which might have originated from a difficulty in getting automatic weapons by whatever means, including theft or Allied airdrops in the Piedmont area sometime in 1944.The real circumstances of its genesis are still unclear. Hearsay has it, that it was created by FIAT workers with experience in gun making, and that the name Variara came from a partisan unit which, in turn, had been named after one of its casualties. At any rate, unlike earlier scratch-built guns (basically Sten Gun copies), the Variara was a completely original project mixing different characteristics borrowed from a wide array of contemporary firearms: