Entrepreneurial dynasties

Maria Franca Ferrero, always at the helm alongside her husband Michele

In the family and in the company, she represented a balancing element between her husband and her two sons Pietro and Giovanni

by Paolo Bricco

12 February 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

One day someone will have to write the secret history of the great entrepreneurs. Because there is a secret history that nobody knows: that of their lifelong companions. On that day, a chapter will be dedicated to Mrs. Maria Franca Fissolo, Michele Ferrero's wife and mother of Pietro and Giovanni.

Maria Franca Fissolo Ferrero passed away at half past five in the morning at her home in Altavilla, on the first hill of Alba. She had recently reached the age of eighty-seven. For everyone in town and in the factory, she was the second soul of Signor Michele, the Italia entrepreneur who shaped - with Nutella and with his ability to build a network of international companies that were fiscally correct and industrially advantageous - a group that, under the leadership of his son Giovanni, has long since exceeded ten billion euros in annual revenues.

In recent times, recalls those who were close to her, Maria Franca would receive phone calls through a collaborator, often preferring not to answer, but then always writing a handwritten note to say thank you and goodbye. Her dimension was one of measure and attachment to the city of Alba. In the family and in the company, he represented an element of balance between Michele, with his entrepreneurial genius, and his two sons Pietro, focused on the industrial side and product research, and Giovanni, more inclined to the commercial and marketing side.

The dimension of balance was based on the symmetry of heart and reason. Without any prevalence or subjection of either member of the couple. Because Mr. Michele, a qualified accountant in Mondovì, had fallen in love with and married a brilliant and strong-willed girl with a solid cultural background: born in Savigliano, after high school and classical high school, she had studied languages at the school of interpreting in Milan and had been hired by the company on 19 March 1961 for her knowledge of English, French and German, at a time marked by Ferrero's first expansion abroad. The following year, Michele and Maria Franca were married. On the occasion of her 80th birthday, Mrs. Maria Franca told Roberto Fiori of La Stampa: 'Although it has been written dozens of times, I was never Michele Ferrero's secretary. What is true is that with him it was classic love at first sight'.

If there is a family (and a family business) in which women counted - in the hard, masculine twentieth century of manufacturing and factories - this was the Ferrero family. The verb used by those who know the family and its entrepreneurial dynamics well is 'co-decide'. She decided together with him. She Maria Franca. He Michele.

In this delicate mechanism of co-decision, while the group's growing internationalisation became clear, with the focus increasingly on Luxembourg, you had no small influence in maintaining - during the activity of the mayor of Alba Giuseppe Rossetto, from 1999 to 2009 - a strategic centrality of the Piedmontese town thanks to the industrial site, the management centre progressively moved from Pino Torinese, the research centre, the intensification of corporate welfare (the crèche, but not only) and the cultural project of the Ferrero foundation.

Maria Franca and Michele experienced the most senseless pain. The loss, through an illness in South Africa, of their first son Pietro, who died on 18 April 2011. On 27 April of that year there is a funeral. On 14 February 2015, Mr Michele died. Those who knew her well describe the composure in the face of these two lacerations, lived in the darkness of grief with the simplicity of the Catholicism of those who, like her, were devoted to Our Lady of Lourdes. The identification between her and her community was profound: "At first I did not know these hills, even though I come from not far away. I was able to appreciate that here there are people of great character, consistent, strong, balanced. I got to know them in depth, the men and women of the Langa. We lived in Brussels for twenty-five years in times that were also difficult and frightening. General Dalla Chiesa advised me to only have as assistants and employees in the house people who knew each other from our land. That's what we did,' she recounted one day. May the land of Langa be kind to you, Signora Maria Franca.