Italy Culture & Language

Regional identity is the single most important fact about Italian culture. More than any national trait, what defines being Italian is being from somewhere specific — Neapolitan, Venetian, Sicilian, Piedmontese — and each of those carries its own dialect, culinary tradition, local saints, festivals and rivalries with the next province along. Unification in 1861 did remarkably little to flatten any of it.

Food as the marker of where you are from

A dish considered definitive in one region — ragù in Bologna, pesto in Genoa, cacio e pepe in Rome — is often barely known, or made quite differently, a few hundred kilometres away. Italians defend their own region’s version in earnest, and the argument is about identity rather than about cooking.

Art funded by rivalry

Italy’s artistic and intellectual influence — opera, Renaissance painting and sculpture, industrial design, cinema — came disproportionately from a handful of cities whose wealth and competition during centuries of fragmentation paid for it. Florence, Venice, Milan and Rome were rival states with treasuries to spend and reputations to defend, which is precisely why so much was made.

Opera, and cinema after the war

Opera was popular entertainment before it was a formal art, written for audiences who knew the repertoire and said so during performances, and the great houses still work as civic institutions in their cities. In the late 1940s Neorealist directors took cameras into bombed streets and cast people who were not actors, and the result changed film-making internationally for a generation.

Family, still the unit

The family remains the central social structure nationwide. Sunday lunch across three generations is ordinary rather than ceremonial, adult children commonly live at home far later than elsewhere in Europe, and a great many businesses are family firms in the literal sense. It is also why August empties the cities: people go where their relatives are.

Italian is a young standard language in an old country. It was built from literary Tuscan, and at unification in 1861 only a small minority of the population actually spoke it — television did more to spread it than any school system.

What the other languages of Italy are called dialects obscures the fact that several are separate languages, not accents: Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian and Sardinian each have millions of speakers and are not mutually intelligible with standard Italian. They are spoken at home and among friends across the country, and UNESCO lists several as vulnerable. Four more are protected by statute — German in South Tyrol, French in the Aosta Valley, Slovene in the north-east, and Friulian, which has its own road signs.

English is widely spoken in the major tourist cities, in hotels and by younger people, and much less so in small towns, in the south, and among anyone over sixty. Italy’s level of English is among the lower ones in western Europe, and this is worth planning for rather than discovering.

A few points of use go a long way. Lei is the polite form and is expected with anyone you have not been introduced to, including shopkeepers. Prego covers you’re welcome, please go ahead, and how can I help. Buongiorno switches to buonasera in the afternoon, earlier than most learners expect. And greeting a shop or a bar on entering, rather than going straight to what you want, is not optional politeness — its absence is noticed.