I’ve not heard of that happening. You might be thinking of the Italian L3/L5 tankette (sometimes called the CV-35 and broadly similar to the British Bren gun carrier). They were used extensively in Ethiopia and somalialand and in the opening years of WW2 and were very poorly armored.
There was an Italian tank [don’t recall the make and model] used during the war in Libya/Egypt [Rommel] that needed to be sandbagged against small arms.