I have never even heard of this particular aircraft before so I decided to do a little digging which was a very hard task indeed as information on it is very sparse.
In Nov 1915 two Italian aero engineers put forward an idea to the Italian war ministry that a monoplane was feasible and that they could have the new design ready for flight tests within three months, this idea was turned down on the grounds that it would be too unsafe in combat conditions.
One of the men Guido Vincenzo never gave up on the idea but without the financial backing of his government it meant that he could not design an aircraft from scratch and so he approached the French government about the possibility of lending a couple of airframes from them for redesign with the promise of handing all design notes over to them if the idea was successful, the French agreed but would only lend one airframe to him which was their very newly designed Nieuport 17.
So in January 1916 the Nieuport was delivered to a secret testing site just outside of Rome and was quickly stripped of all non essential weight for the testing, the lower wings were removed and the strengthening struts added.
The Le Rhône 9J engine was kept but some fine tuning was needed before the initial flight test to could start as it was felt that the engine would not be able to breathe with the extra speed the aircraft may achieve and a new instrument panel was also added.
Initial flight test exceeded expectations with the aircraft reaching speeds in excess of 260 kph this of course was with out the weight of machine guns which when added later reduced this speed to 230 Kph.
Initially the aircraft was named the Un'Ala ( One wing ) but later changed to the Nieuport 17X as a thank you to the French.
This is where I drew a blank as I could not find any more info, I suppose something must have happened to the airframe during testing but then if that was true why would this solitary photo show up in the captured allied aircraft of the Germans section in 1917 and actually now that I think of it (though not as fast) the Germans eventually had a le Rhone powered aircraft themselves the Fokker EV in 1918............I wonder.
Anyway here is what i think the aircraft looked like.....
