In 2026 Rossana turns a hundred, and the news caught me more off guard than expected: I never imagined a candy could sit on a shelf for an entire century while changing almost nothing about itself. Time for a confession, since my own blog rules ask me to start from personal experience: the taste of that little sweet has never fully won me over. The filling feels a touch cloying, and the hard shell puts my teeth to the test. Yet one glimpse of that red, semi-transparent wrapper sends me straight back to childhood, sitting on my grandmother’s sofa with a hand buried in a glass jar full of assorted sweets. It’s a small paradox worth telling: a product cherished more for what it represents than for what it actually contains. In many ways it works like Proust’s madeleine in the Recherche: a tiny, almost trivial object able to bring an entire world back to the surface, with the taste itself barely mattering.
Why it’s called Rossana: the name comes from Cyrano de Bergerac
The brand was born in 1926 at Perugina’s factories in Perugia, created by Federico Seneca, one of the most influential advertising figures of twentieth-century Italy, whose style carried clear echoes of the era’s Futurist movement. The name is no accident: it comes from Roxane, the woman loved by Cyrano in Edmond Rostand’s famous play. In Italian the character becomes Rossana, and the wrapper’s bold red soon earned her the popular nickname “lady in red”. A literary choice for a candy worth a few cents, and one that says a lot about how, a century ago, brands were already being built to last. Anyone curious about corporate naming today will find echoes of that era in our piece on the Futurist poets who coined some of the most celebrated names in Italian manufacturing.
The recipe and the wrapper have barely changed
The original formula pairs a hard outer shell with a soft, milk-and-hazelnut heart: a contrast in texture that remains the product’s most recognisable trait, together with the red, semi-transparent paper wrapped around every piece. Over a hundred years the formats have multiplied, not the essence: today the classic 175-gram bag sits alongside spreadable-cream jars launched in 2019, plus chocolate, Sicilian pistachio, and gluten-free coconut variants. The core idea, though, still belongs to the 1920s, and that consistency is exactly what turns the wrapper into a small cult object, one that speaks for itself without needing many words, as our article on vintage labels and brand identity also explores.
The tv leap: consecrated by Carosello
The 1960s brought the decisive turning point for the candy’s popularity: commercials inside Carosello, the show that turned advertising into a nightly ritual for entire families gathered around the television. That’s where Rossana settled permanently into Italian households, becoming part of the shared memory of several generations. Anyone wanting to understand how advertising worked in that era, built on small stories rather than slogans, can read our deep dive on when commercials were still short films.
From Perugina to Fida: ownership changes, the spirit doesn’t
The brand’s industrial journey passes through several major shifts: Perugina kept it until 1987, when it joined the Nestlé group; in 2016 management moved to Fida, a Piedmontese company specialising precisely in candy, which today generates roughly 32 million euros in annual revenue with this product as the jewel of its catalogue. Under the new ownership came the line extensions already mentioned, designed to reach different palates without touching the historic recipe sold in the original bag.
Why a vintage icon still charms younger generations
The most interesting phenomenon of recent years concerns younger audiences: the red wrapper has become a pop icon shared across social media, helped along by what marketing observers call “kidult nostalgia”, the adult urge to rediscover objects tied to childhood. The same dynamic that explains why Gen Z looks with growing curiosity at grandmothers’ habits finds a perfect example here: a product designed a century ago suddenly feels relevant to people who never lived through that century at all.
Immortality isn’t only about taste
Back to where I started: I’m still no great admirer of the flavour, yet I understand perfectly why this little sweet has lasted a hundred years. It doesn’t survive on culinary merit, but on its ability to stay exactly itself while everything around it changes: packaging, jingles, corporate ownership, public taste. Every time I spot that red wrapper in a shop, I think less about flavour and more about my grandmother’s glass jar, and maybe that’s the real product Perugina, and later Fida, managed to package: not a candy, but a memory shared by millions of Italian families.
Back in high school I read Proust and his obsession with “la fuite du temps” with more than a little impatience, convinced that all that brooding over lost time was just a literary indulgence reserved for the French. Today, faced with an ordinary candy that carries me straight back to my grandmother’s living room, I owe him, and that whole strand of French literature that made involuntary memory a central theme, a virtual apology: you were right all along.
