From mozzarella to wine to the new Alfa Romeo SUV: the Italian government declares war on the so-called Italian Sounding. “Counterfeiting, Italian sounding, every year dit drains tens of billions of euros from the Italian system and compromises the quality of our excellence and our name. We must be implacable against those who think they can use the Italian name to sell products that have nowhere near the excellence that Italy can boast.” The Prime Minister said it Giorgia Meloni speaking at the 56th edition of Vinitalyin Verona.
The minister Adolfo Ursoin recent days, has lashed out against the new Stellantis vehicle, theAlfa Romeo Milan, which however is produced in Poland – like the Jeep Avenger or, until recently, the Fiat 500 with a combustion engine. His colleague Francesco Lollobrigida, however, supported Italian wine. But what is Italian Sounding? AND how much damage it causes to our economy? Let’s see it together.
“A brand and a company respond to rules. Anyone can produce anywhere, but obviously they must transparently say where the product was made” said the Minister of Business and Made in Italy Adolfo Urso this morning, on the occasion of Made in Italy Day, and insisting on the issue of Alfa Romeo Milano. According to him, the law against Italian Sounding which Italy has recently adopted would ban this “confusion”. He said that “the important thing is to be fair to the consumer, in order to leave him the freedom to choose with awareness”.
For Francesco LollobrigidaMinister of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty, at Vinitaly in Verona, “We must defend our products and know that they represent excellence in terms of quality, but the quality must be recognizable to the people who buy. The danger of Italian sounding is that people buy things thinking they are Italian, but instead find that they are not Italian.. At an international level we need to increasingly create a condition of transparency. The production and transformation process must be legible, so that people can choose what to buy and how much to pay for it.”
With Italian Sounding you define what “sounds Italian”, very often real counterfeits, in other cases dissimilar products, vaguely similar to the original, but produced abroad. This is the case of the infamous Parmesan, or Salsa Pomarola, the Zottarella which is a kind of mozzarella produced in Germany. And so on.
It is calculated, according to The European House – Ambrosetti, that in the world there are 79 billion products that could be configured as Italian Sounding. From actual imitations, to the false indication with the tricolor flag, up to the descendants of emigrants who use their surname as “certification” of the Italian nature of the product. On the other hand, have you ever tried to buy spaghetti or – heaven forbid – lasagna Bolognese in a supermarket in England?
The world record for these “fakes” is held by them United States, but there is a very high incidence in Japan, while in Europe the questionable primacy is held by Germany. According to Coldiretti, this business – limiting ourselves to food – it is worth 120 billion euros worldwide. If we consider that, in 2022, our sector exports reached 60 billion euros, the extent of the damage is quite evident.
