Roller Team Brand Guidelines: Caravans International, a Blue Line & the Cusona Plant

An English caravan maker, a Tuscan workshop and a Granduca.

Roller Team is a younger name than the vehicles it carries. Its roots, as the Italian trade site CamperOnLine traced them in a June 2012 factory feature, go back to 1976, when the London-listed English caravan maker C.I. Ltd opened a plant at Varedo, near Monza. Its first Italian caravans, the Riviera, were white with a pale green band, and dealers nicknamed them “mentine”, little mints, the site says.

Tuscany came next. In 1978 Caravans International opened a service centre at Linari, and in January 1983 it was taken over by Pier Luigi Alinari, which CamperOnLine marks as the official birth of Caravans International Italiana. Its first product was a caravan, the C.I. Zero, built at Barberino Val d’Elsa.

The most important step for Roller Team came in 1988. That year, according to the same feature, the company opened a new plant at San Gimignano and created a separate brand, CTP Granduca, placed a step above its C.I. vehicles. The first Granduca, the model 56, was built on the Fiat Ducato and set apart by red and grey exterior graphics. In 1992 the Granduca range was renewed and joined by the Pegaso, with a wedge-shaped over-cab section, names that later passed to Roller Team.

The word “Roller” arrived from elsewhere. CamperOnLine wrote in a January 2012 road test that Autoroller was born in the late 1970s as the name of the motorhomes made by Roller, the historic caravan factory at Calenzano, near Florence. Forbes Italia, in a March 2024 report on the district, quotes an industry association official describing Roller and Laika as its first two firms of real size. The Calenzano company stopped trading in the mid-1990s, and around 1996 the Caravans International group took over the AutoRoller name for two simple family models, the AR 1 and AR 2.

An English bank, a French group and a new factory at Cusona.

Ownership changed twice in two years. CamperOnLine says the merchant bank Schroders took a majority of Caravans International in 1998, the same year the Tuscan group bought the English motorhome maker Auto-Trail. Then, in 1999, the group was acquired by the French leisure-vehicle maker Trigano. Trigano’s own corporate timeline lists that year as the acquisition of Caravans International, Roller Team and Auto-Trail.

The first result was a tidy-up. All the ranges were gathered under the Caravans International name and split into two lines, the site says: an orange line with Carioca, Riviera, Mizar and Cipro, and a blue line with Autoroller, Granduca, Pegaso and Corfù.

The blue line became a brand of its own. At the end of 2000, according to CamperOnLine, the company opened its current factory at Cusona, near San Gimignano, changed its name to Trigano S.p.A. and launched Roller Team, into which every series of the former blue line moved. The UK dealer Continental Leisure, in a 2023 brand profile, dates the founding to 2001. Caravans International stayed alongside as the sister brand.

The early years were busy. CamperOnLine says that in the 2002–03 season the company became Italy’s largest maker of leisure vehicles, with a 17 percent share. Vans followed from 2003; by 2006 they were sold as the Roller Team Livingstone, built at Atessa in Abruzzo in a dedicated plant.

After the 2008 downturn, the site says, Cusona was reorganised to build each vehicle to order. In 2010 the company introduced EXPS, short for Extreme Protection System: wall panels insulated with styrofoam, with a polyurethane perimeter frame in place of the old wooden one.

How the category presents itself.

Motorhome makers tend to sell a picture before they sell a vehicle: a white van on a pitch by the sea, doors open, with the road implied behind it. The colour itself has a history in the category. Chausson says it was the first maker to “dare” white bodywork, on its 1984 overcabs.

The second image is more technical. Layout is what buyers compare, so makers lean on plans, cut-away views and model numbers that stand for a floor plan. Chausson’s 2027 catalogue, for instance, explains a lounge feature by listing the numbered models that have it, and Rapido’s vans run from V55 to V68. Rapido’s website offers a comparison tool and 360-degree views of its models, and Chausson’s invites buyers to compare its ranges by the way they want to travel.

The third setting is the dealer forecourt. Chausson says it reaches more than 15 European countries through specialist distributors, and Trigano, its parent, created the Libertium dealership network in 2023 and says it has 70 sales outlets. Rapido’s history shows how early this mattered: Le Journal des Entreprises counts ten dealers in the brand’s first years of rigid caravans.

The category’s annual stage is the Caravan Salon in Düsseldorf. The fair calls itself the world’s leading trade fair for mobile travel, and reports 259,000 visitors in 2026, with 834 exhibitors from 41 countries in 15 halls and on the outdoor grounds. It says those visitors covered more than 250,000 square metres of motorhomes, caravans, roof-top tents and equipment, which puts whole vehicles, not just pictures of them, in front of the public. The next edition runs from 27 August to 5 September 2027.

A Tuscan maker inside a French group.

Roller Team is still made by Trigano S.p.A. at Cusona, in what Forbes Italia calls the “Camper Valley”: five municipalities between Siena and Florence where, the magazine wrote in March 2024, nine out of ten Italian motorhomes are built. It lists Roller Team among the Trigano brands made there.

The range is organised by type and by number. Trigano’s brand page lists compact vans, camper vans, low-profile, over-cab and A-class models, sleeping up to six. For the 2014 season, CamperOnLine reported, the entry-level Autoroller gave way to the new Zefiro, and model names moved to a three-digit system: a 2 to start, a middle digit for the layout and a closing 5. For 2027, the site said in August 2026, the brand is concentrating on compact vehicles, with a new entry-level van collection, a restyled Livingstone Advance and new Kronos Fit models.

The brand talks about itself in terms of sport. In 2016 it ran a weekly series on its website, “Granduca: un camper una storia”, which CamperOnLine says opened by describing Roller Team as dynamic and sporty, with a long record of sponsorship at motorcycle and other sporting events.

Design has also been a subject of research. In November 2015 the brand presented Triaca, a concept motorhome whose name stands for a phrase about reducing the environmental impact of campers, at the University of Florence’s “Design Stories” series at Calenzano. CamperOnLine says it grew out of a 2012 research call from the Tuscany region. Paolo Bicci, then chief executive of Trigano S.p.A., said the aim was a “camper of the future” that could be built straight away, in our translation. In the UK, Continental Leisure says the Auto-Roller 707 was named best family motorhome at the 2023 Motorhome Awards run by Motorcaravan Motorhome Monthly.

For a design guide, Roller Team shows how a brand can be assembled from parts that already had a following: a colour-coded line of existing ranges was given one name, a new factory and a new owner, while Granduca and Pegaso kept their own. Compare Adria, another maker that joined the Trigano group, and Laika, its Tuscan neighbour with a longer history of its own. For this guide we use a line blue, a Siena clay and a travertine cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Roller Team’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.