Francesco Koristka, of Polish descent, founded a firm in Milan in 1880 that became the leading Italian manufacturer of microscopes and one of the country's few precision-equipment makers to export to Europe as well as America. Thanks to his contacts with Ernst Abbe (1840-1905), Koristka was able to build microscopes and photographic objectives based on Zeiss patents. In 1929, Koristka was taken over by Officine Galileo of Florence.