The 10 longest-standing historic Italian businesses: history, heritage and brand

When an Italian business passes the hundred-year mark, its founding date stops being a biographical detail and becomes an asset. We have selected ten Italian businesses, from the medieval pharmacy of Santa Maria Novella to Ducati, to analyse how history, craftsmanship and vision are transformed into brand heritage: recognisable value, solid positioning and a competitive advantage that is hard to replicate.

The selection looks at how a workshop, artisan know-how, a place or an industrial vision can become intangible heritage. When this heritage is organised and made usable in the present, it becomes brand heritage: history stops being mere memory and becomes a lever for positioning, reputation and value.

What it means to be a historic business in Italy

In Italy, recognition as a ‘historic business’ is not merely an honorary title: many regions have set up official registers that protect workshops and companies with at least fifty years of continuous activity, recognising their cultural and economic value to the local area. This status brings institutional visibility, access to dedicated funding calls and a credibility that is hard to build through communication alone. The real differentiator, however, is not age, but the ability to make that history operational in the present: a heritage brand that fails to update its narrative risks becoming a museum, not a business.Copy with title

Italian brand heritage: why history becomes a marketing lever

Brand heritage is a company’s ability to use its own history as a credible, differentiating positioning argument.
Nostalgia? Absolutely not. Rather, it means identifying the founding values, production gestures or symbolic places that remain relevant to today’s audience, and building communication, experience and offering on top of them.

Pineider does it with handwriting in a digital age; Marinella with the ritual of the tie sewn in Naples; Florian with the immersive experience of a space that has remained almost unchanged for three hundred years. In all these cases history is not the backdrop to the brand: it is the product itself.

1. Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 1221

The story of this almost thousand-year-old institution begins with the arrival of the Dominican friars in Florence in 1221. Over the centuries, the apothecary preparations born in the convent grew into a universe of products, rituals and places recognised all over the world: so much so that the business still exists today, backed by eight centuries of history.

The premises on via della Scala still function as a threshold in time: people come in to buy, but the experience is built around the sense of entering a story larger than any single object. Here, heritage lives in the architecture, the names, the formulas and the theatricality of the space.

2. Barovier & Toso, Murano, 1295

Barovier & Toso traces its origins back to 1295 and still produces artistic lighting in its furnace on the island. Seven centuries later, the brand retains a creative role alongside its guardianship of technique. Venetian crystal is used in contemporary collections, bespoke projects and collaborations with international designers.

In this way, while taking on new forms, tradition remains recognisable and lives on.

3. Caffè Florian, Venice, 1720

On 29 December 1720 Floriano Francesconi opened a shop in Piazza San Marco called Alla Venezia Trionfante. The name soon changed, taking on that of its founder.

And so, over the years, its rooms became a meeting place for writers, artists, travellers and leading political figures. Today Florian is still there, having succeeded in turning its very premises into a product. Furnishings, music, service and location all contribute to the same experience. Its strength lies in the continuity of a ritual of hospitality that Venice has made impossible to replicate elsewhere.

4. Amarelli, Rossano, 1731

In 1731 the Amarelli family opened a concio, a works for extracting juice from the liquorice roots growing along the Ionian coast of Calabria. Since then the product has remained central, while formats, markets and storytelling tools have changed.

The Liquorice Museum, housed in the company’s historic headquarters, makes visible what normally stays locked away in corporate archives. Amarelli shows how territory, family and specialisation can support one another, provided the history is organised and made accessible.

5. Ginori 1735, Doccia, 1735

Carlo Andrea Ginori founded the Doccia manufactory in 1735, when porcelain was still a rare and experimental material in Europe. In the centuries that followed, the manufactory went through changes of ownership, crises and relaunches, while preserving a grammar of forms, decorations and skills.

Today the archive engages with contemporary artists and designers, feeding new collections. The past works as a creative reserve: it offers codes to be recognised, combined and carried into different contexts.

6. Pineider, Florence, 1774

Francesco Pineider opened his own shop in Florence in 1774.

Paper, notebooks and correspondence tools found a clientele of travellers, diplomats, writers and institutions.

Over time the brand has extended its reach into pens and leather goods, keeping writing as its symbolic centre. It is an example of coherent extension: the categories change, while the cultural world in which the brand wishes to be recognised remains stable.

7. Borsalino, Alessandria, 1857

In 1857 Giuseppe Borsalino opened the workshop in Alessandria from which one of the most celebrated names in hatmaking would emerge. In everyday language, the founder’s surname has come to denote an entire type of hat. It is one of the rarest achievements for a brand: entering the collective imagination to the point of transcending the company’s own boundaries. Behind that fame lies a long and complex process, safeguarded by artisans and made visible through the product.

8. Olivetti, Ivrea, 1908

Camillo Olivetti founded his company in Ivrea in 1908.

Typewriters, calculators and the first computers were only part of a broader project, in which industry, design, architecture and social responsibility shared the same vision. Today Olivetti operates in digital and the Internet of Things.

The sector has changed several times, yet the brand continues to be associated with a precise idea of innovation. Its legacy shows that a corporate culture, too, can become a recognisable asset.

9. E. Marinella, Naples, 1914

In 1914 Eugenio Marinella opened a shop of just twenty square metres on the Riviera di Chiaia. He wanted to create a little corner of England in Naples, choosing fabrics and objects that would appeal to the taste of high society. That intimate scale has remained part of the legend: even today, customers enter a place where service, personal relationships and product carry equal weight.

Four generations have taken the name beyond Naples, keeping the original shop as the narrative and emotional centre of the brand.

10. Ducati, Bologna, 1926

Ducati was founded in 1926 as a company specialising in radio technology and components. The move to motorcycles came after the war and completely changed the company’s sector, without losing its drive towards research, precision and performance.

In 2026 the brand celebrated its centenary by turning its archive into events, collections, images and new experiences. Its story closes this selection with an important idea: continuity can survive even a radical transformation, when identity is able to guide it.

How Italy’s historic companies manage generational transitions

One of the critical points for any long-lived business is the transfer of governance between generations.
Businesses such as Amarelli and Barovier & Toso show different models: the former has kept family control while strengthening its Calabrian territorial identity as a central narrative element; the latter has brought in external designers to update the product without altering its manufacturing technique.

In both cases, continuity was not passivity but a conscious strategic choice, underpinned by a clear definition of what cannot change and what must instead evolve.

History becomes value when it continues to guide decisions

These ten businesses differ enormously in age, size and sector. What they share is the ability to recognise which elements of their brand identity deserve to be safeguarded and which can evolve.

An archive without interpretation remains a mere store. Longevity instead requires precise brand governance work, capable of codifying the company’s heritage, transferring it, protecting it and making it usable by those who will lead the organisation tomorrow. This step becomes even more delicate in family businesses, where generational continuity involves roles, relationships, culture and public perception all at once. In a market where only 30% of family businesses outlive their founder and just 13% reach the third generation, the existence of companies able to endure for centuries is a remarkable indicator of value. The historic businesses that continue to speak to the present have learned to govern time. They preserve enough to remain recognisable and change enough to remain desirable.