The NATO phonetic alphabet is a universally adopted spelling code. Or using the grid to your right you can click a photo to enter the main menus. If you'd just like to start your exploration of Italy with some ideas of places to go then I'd recommend starting at the highlighted must see Italy page. You can keep in touch with the latest developments in Italy, particularly important at the moment at the time of the pandemic, via my Italy Review Blog for which you'll find links below to the Facebook and Twitter pages. I've visited every place that's listed on the website which means I'm able to give useful advice for first-time visitors. The photos and descriptions on the website are all my own work and are the fruit of my extensive travels around the country. Alongside the major tourist destinations that you've already heard of, there are thousands of others that may come as a surprise with the intention of the website to provide inspiration for your future trips to the country. Throughout the three thousand pages of the website you'll find comprehensive tourist information, opinion and original photos. Italy Review is an independent guide to Italy, showcasing the very best that the country has to offer. Its main usage comes in the word perch é which means "why". Of the two versions of the accented e, this is the one that's used less. You could say the acute accent points forward instead of backwards, or alternatively, that it runs north west to south east. The letter e not only has a version with a grave accent, but another version with an acute accent. The accented ù is less frequently used than the other grave vowels but nevertheless works in exactly the same way with the emphasis placed at the end of the word. In Italian, the emphasis of università goes on the final syllable/letter.Įxample: è (third person of the verb "to be", or more simply "is")Įxample: lunedì (the words for each day from Monday to Friday end in the grave i, as does the word for yes (s ì)Įxample: the grave ò is used either in place names such as Nard ò, or more commonly, to show the future tense in the first person such as in "andr ò" which means "I will go"Įxample: Temù (town in Lombardy). If you repeat the word, you'll realise you've put the emphasis on the middle syllable, the "ver". Generally-speaking, if a word ends in a grave accented vowel, the emphasis should be on the final letter when pronouncing it.Īn example of this is the English word "university". These are commonly used in Italian and denote the way a word should be pronounced. While we're on the subject of the Italian alphabet, it's worth noting that there are accented versions of each vowel frequently used in Italian spelling and pronunciation, although it's unlikely you'd need to spell them out.Įach of the five vowels has an equivalent with the grave accent, where a little diagonal line runs from north east to south west (I personally think of these as pointing forwards but not everybody does) above the letter. There's a similar situation with the letter S with Salerno used in the south and Siena used in the northern half of the country. There are also some regional differences to the Italian phonetic alphabet: for example, someone from the south may use Palermo for the letter P while further north they may use Pisa. 
Each of these three letters has been highlighted in red below. For those three letters you don't have to rack your brain to think of a clever word, you just say the names of the letters so: acca (H), cu (Q) and zeta (Z). Those letters are in blue and italics in the list below.Īnother collection of letters doesn't have a place name attached to them: H, Q and Z. The five that don't appear in the Italian alphabet but do in English are J, K, W, X and Y. It's also worth bearing in mind that the official Italian alphabet consists of only 21 letters.
To make life easier, you could just memorise the letters you need to spell your own name before trying to remember them all, but the longer you spend in Italy, the more familiar the other letters will become. So let's say you're in the car somewhere and on the phone to a hotel receptionist to book your room for the night, you may be asked to spell your name phonetically.
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