Where Did Italian Brainrot Originate? The Real Story

6 min read · Brainrot Test

Italian brainrot originated on TikTok in January 2025, when a video of an AI-generated three-legged shark in Nike sneakers, called Tralalero Tralala, went viral with a fake-Italian voiceover. The first upload is credited to a TikTok account called @eZburger401, and a repost on January 13, 2025 pulled around 7 million views. So where did Italian brainrot originate? One chaotic shark on TikTok, then an entire meme universe within weeks.

If you watched the whole thing happen in real time from your For You page, Check my brainrot and see what that scrolling did to your score.

The short answer

Here's the history of Italian brainrot as a timeline.

Dates come from Wikipedia's coverage of Italian brainrot, Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Steal a Brainrot. The rest of this post explains each step.

The first Italian brainrot videos

Who started Italian brainrot?

Wikipedia credits TikTok user @eZburger401 with the first Tralalero Tralala video in January 2025. That account was later banned, likely because of profanity in the audio. Other accounts reposted and remixed it, including one that paired the audio with a shark-pigeon hybrid, and the January 13 repost with the sneaker shark is the one that really exploded.

So when people ask "who created the Italian brainrot," there isn't one clean answer. One person started it, and thousands of reposters and remixers made it a genre.

What was the first Italian brainrot?

Tralalero Tralala. Almost every origins of Italian brainrot explainer agrees the shark came first. Everything else copied his formula: an AI image, a fake-Italian name, and a dramatic narrator. Full breakdown of what the words say is in our Tralalero Tralala meaning post.

Why the fake Italian names and the TikTok voice

Why is it called Italian brainrot? Because of two things:

1. The names. Characters get Italian-sounding endings like -ini, -ino and -ello. "Crocodile" becomes Crocodilo. "Banana" becomes Bananini. It's the internet doing an exaggerated Italian accent in word form.
2. The voice. Most clips use an AI text-to-speech voice reading in Italian with maximum drama. Even if you don't speak a word of Italian, it sounds like an opera announcer hyping a wrestling match.

Add surreal AI images, and you get content that makes zero sense but is weirdly impossible to skip. The dumber it is, the harder it hits. That's the whole appeal.

How Tralalero Tralala made it go viral

What started Italian brainrot spreading so fast? A few things lined up at once:

• The audio was a sound. On TikTok, a catchy sound gets reused. Once creators started pairing the Tralalero voice with new AI creatures, the format became a template.
• Anyone could make one. AI image tools made it easy to generate "a crocodile that is also a plane" in seconds.
• Comment-section lore. Fans started inventing relationships and battles between characters, which gave people a reason to keep watching.
• Gen Alpha adopted it. Younger kids found it hilarious, and it spread through classrooms and group chats as fast as it spread online.

By February and March 2025, there were dozens of characters. If you want the whole roster, our list of all Italian brainrot characters sorts them by wave.

From TikTok to Roblox and trading cards

When was Italian brainrot a "thing" outside TikTok? Spring 2025. Here's how it jumped platforms.

Roblox

Steal a Brainrot launched on Roblox on May 16, 2025. You buy brainrot characters off a conveyor belt, earn money from them, and try to steal other players' characters. According to Wikipedia, it hit 25.4 million concurrent players in October 2025, which made it the first game to pass 25 million. For a lot of younger kids, Roblox is where they met the characters first, not TikTok.

Toys, stickers and cards

• Panini released an Italian brainrot sticker album in 2025.
• Italian newsstands sold Skifidol trading cards.
• Plushies of Tung Tung Tung Sahur and friends showed up everywhere.

Fortnite

In 2026, Fortnite added Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Ballerina Cappuccina as skins. Plenty of players weren't fans, mostly because the characters come from AI-generated images, but it showed how mainstream the meme had become.

Is Italian brainrot actually Italian?

Kind of, and also no.

• The first audio was in Italian, and many early characters had Italian voiceovers.
• The creators weren't all Italian. Tung Tung Tung Sahur came from an Indonesian creator, and Indonesian and other creators added more characters.
• The names are fake Italian. Most aren't real words, just Italian-sounding.

So is Italian brainrot really Italian? It's Italian-flavored, the same way a lot of internet memes are "American" just because the first viral version was in English. By the time it hit Roblox, it was global. Wikipedia notes it got big in the US, South Korea, Germany, Poland and China.

The Indonesian twist

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is the clearest example. Its name comes from the drum sound used to wake people for sahur, the meal before dawn during Ramadan. It has nothing to do with Italy at all. The respectful version of that story is in our Tung Tung Tung Sahur meaning post.

Is Italian brainrot dying out or still growing?

How long has Italian brainrot been around? Less than two years, which in internet time is ancient. Here's where it stands.

Signs it's fading:

• New characters rarely go viral on TikTok the way the OGs did.
• The joke feels "done" to a lot of older Gen Z.

Signs it's still alive:

• Games like Steal a Brainrot keep adding characters.
• Toys, Fortnite skins and stickers keep the big names visible.
• Gen Alpha still quotes it constantly, which is exactly how memes survive.

The honest answer: the TikTok trend peaked in spring 2025, but the characters turned into a franchise. And franchises stick around.

Here's the thing nobody tracks: how many hours you personally put into this trend. Remembering and judging that yourself is basically impossible. Brainrot Test turns it into a number: 17 questions about what you actually do when you pick up your phone, a score from 0 to 100, and a comparison with everyone else. Check my brainrot

Where did Italian brainrot originate, and where did your attention go?

You know where Italian brainrot originated now. Next minute: find out where your own focus went. Brainrot Test is a website, so there's nothing to install. Answer 17 questions, get your score, and start a two-minute daily detox drill that takes a point off each time you finish it.

Check my brainrot

FAQ

When did Italian brainrot start?

Italian brainrot started in January 2025, when the Tralalero Tralala shark video went viral on TikTok. Most of the famous characters were created in February and March 2025.

Who created the Italian brainrot trend?

TikTok user @eZburger401 is credited with the first Tralalero Tralala video, and the account was later banned. After that, thousands of creators in Italy, Indonesia and elsewhere built the trend by making their own characters.

How did Italian brainrot start spreading to kids?

It spread through TikTok sounds first, then Roblox, especially Steal a Brainrot, which launched in May 2025. Toys, sticker albums and school group chats did the rest.

Is Italian brainrot from Italy?

Only partly. The first audio was Italian and the names sound Italian, but big characters like Tung Tung Tung Sahur came from Indonesia, and the trend quickly went global.

Is Italian brainrot dying in 2026?

The TikTok wave has slowed, but the characters live on through games, toys and Fortnite skins. It's less of a trend and more of a franchise now.