Do you have fake italian sounding brands in your country and which are they?

15 comments

1. I suppose the biggest clothing offender in Ireland and across Europe is Massimo Dutti – the higher end brand from Zara of Spain.

2. We have a café/restaurant chain called Café Vivaldi. Some of their main items are ciabatta sandwiches

3. We have a restaurant chain called L’Osteria which was founded in Nürnberg and has found its way into most major cities

4. Pretty sure Koenigsegg name their cars to be somewhat Italian-sounding (Trevita, Agera, Regera, Gemera), but it is Swedish.

5. Off the top of my head I can think of Massimo Dutti (Inditex Group, Spain), Emidio Tucci (clothing brand of El Corte Inglés), and Luisetti (shoe company).

6. Ah yeah, practically every italian food is a fake brand. From *Dolmio* to *Restaurante* pizza.

   However, they are at least reasonably named. The funniest brand has to be lidl’s “Mcennedy”. Which is like a bunch of German lab coats based a brand on vague Irish/Scottish surnames they heard on american daytime TV!

7. In the UK, there used to be a nationwide chain of mid-range menswear shops called Ciro Citterio which was meant to give the impression of being an Italian designer brand. They disappeared/went bankrupt about 10 years ago.

   These might be sold in other countries as well, but British Aldis sell two beers called ‘Birra Mapelli’ and ‘Rossini’ neither of which are brewed in Italy but are copying Italian beers Birra Moretti and Peroni.

8. « Pizza dell arte » which is a pizza chain, mainly directed towards families and traveling salesmen.

   Their pizzas are actually not too terrible and they have actual pizzaioli. Not the best by any means but decent.

9. We have the opposite: Paste de Maramures (Maramures being a historical region of Romania); they are marketed as being Romanian (with Romanian flag on the box, and Romanian traditional motifs), but are actually made in Italy.

   https://www.mpasta.com/catalog/index.html#p=14

10. Not really any specific brand, but your culture has been fitted to our country as well.

    Come to the Netherlands, try one of our “authentic” Italian “ristorante” that -coincidentally- also serves fresh kebab and pizza with shawarma.

    Our try one of our trademarked “italiaanse bollen” meaning italian buns. It’s basically just a plain bread roll with oregano and some dried tomato pieces.

11. I had already written, have you never heard of “Italian Sounding”? Then I thought, probably not, doesn’t make sense in Italy, think Kiru 😉
    Walk through a German supermarket. Of course, we don’t write “Made in Italy” on food, because that would be illegal. But we want to create an Italian impression. For exampel pasta, Rewe calls his Pasta here, “Bella Pasta.” By the way, several Italians have already told me that Bella Pasta sounds bullshit in Italian…
    [https://shop.rewe.de/productList?search=bella+pasta](https://shop.rewe.de/productList?search=bella+pasta)

    ​

    There is a special association of your Confagricoltura in Germany that does nothing else than warn off products that claim to be Italian but are not.

    ​

    ITALIAN SOUNDING e.V.

    Siamo l’unica associazione in Germania che rappresenta specificamente interessi dell’industria e dell’artigianato italiano per la protezione dei produttori italiani e dei consumatori in generale.

    https://italian-sounding.de/it/

12. Romania: one in five restaurants claims to be Italian, with menus in Italian and all. Cafes, not so much, since the specialty coffee scene (read: bearded hipster baristas) is bigger than the *traditional* espresso business.

    Osteria Zucca, Borsalino, Presto, Capri, Amarillo, Tratoria Vivaldi/Ciao/Monza/Il Calcio/Don Vito/Azzuro, Trenta Pizza and countless more.

    Some of them are chains. Some of them are suprisingly good, though. Few of them are owned and run by Italians.

    But it’s damn funny to drive to a forgotten place in the country side and find a shitty restaurant with menus in Italian, where they also serve traditional Romanian food and sometimes even Asian food. They have menus with hundreds of items, with 15 soups, 25 pizzas, 30 grilled meats and 20 pastas.

    [Example](https://azzurro.com.ro/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Azzurro-Menu-2021-Online.pdf). Soups are at „Supe și ciorbe”. Only one resembles something Italian (vegetable cream).

13. In the Netherlands there’s a brand of stoves and ovens named “Boretti¨”. A brand of olive oil is “Bertolli”

    In the ’50s and early ’60s there was a brand of mopeds named “Berini” which was actually named after the founders BErnard, RInus and NIco,

14. Another one from the UK – the main operator of passenger trains between London and Glasgow is a First Group / Trenitalia joint venture that’s branded as [‘Avanti West Coast’](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_West_Coast).

15. There is a fake luxury watch brand *Filippo Loreti* by a couple of Lithuanian dudes. I guess all the Italian-inspired restaurant names like San Valentino, Pomodoro, Pizza Verde don’t count?

    There is a coffeehouse chain called VERO CAFE, and some time ago it suddenly struck me that it’s not even real Italian or any other language. In Italian it would be Caffè Vero, in Spanish Café Verdadero.