Writing Across Languages: Italian Setting, English Prose
I’m blogging every day in the run-up to the US publication of Daughter of Genoa. Today: my three rules for writing about Italian-speaking characters in English.
From romance to histfic and beyond, Italian settings and stories are enduringly popular with authors and readers in the Anglophone world. But how do you handle the Italian-language element when your book is written in English?
These three simple rules could apply to any language, but Italian is the one I know best. Note: the examples in this post were 100% invented by me. I have sometimes referred to my own work, because it’s handy.
Rule 1: Don’t Use Language as Set-Dressing
How many times have you opened a book that’s written in English but set in Italy, and met a paragraph like this?
“Everyone in the borgo knew that il vecchietto Ruggiero had been a partigiano. He spent every evening at the local osteria drinking grappa and indulging in impassioned conversazione with the other comunisti, his fazzoletto rosso always impeccably in place.”
There’s a dual risk in using Italian words in this way. If your reader knows that most of these are commonplace terms that also work perfectly fine in English, then they might easily wonder why you’re throwing in the Italian quite so often, and whether you’re trying for a cheap form of authenticity or just showing off.
And if they don’t know the Italian terms, then they’ll have to keep looking them up – because if they don’t, they won’t understand a damn thing. Not only will this pull them out of the story, but it’s unnecessarily exclusive. Do you really want to make your story inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t already speak Italian?
Precisely because foreign words can act as a barrier in this way, it’s best to use them sparingly and for maximum impact. I don’t think my example sentence suffers at all if most of them are taken out. Quite the opposite:
“Everyone in the village knew that frail old Ruggiero had been a partisan. He spent every evening at the local inn drinking grappa and indulging in impassioned conversation with the other communists, his red kerchief always impeccably in place.”
“Grappa” is the perfect example of a foreign-language term that can work with your story, rather than against it. It describes something specifically Italian. To those who’ve never tried it, it’s still clear from context that it must be some kind of drink. And to those who have, the taste is unforgettable.
Rule 2: For Dialogue, First Consider Context
When including Italian-speaking characters in dialogue, there are a few different scenarios to consider.
If this is inner dialogue and you are ventriloquising your Italian character’s thoughts, then you are acting as their translator. Their reasoning will be fluent and easy, and you should render it as such. Surprisingly many authors have their second-language-speaking characters think in broken English, but that is neither fair nor helpful. A person’s grasp of a second (or third, fourth, fifth …) language does not reflect their intelligence, so don’t let that prejudice creep into your writing.
If everyone in this scene has Italian as their first language, and they are speaking Italian to one another, then here, too, you are the translator. You are in their world, interpreting their conversation to your English-speaking reader. That interpretation should be free, fluent and seamless.
If everyone is speaking Italian, but it isn’t everyone’s first language, things get more nuanced. My strong preference is to write the scene entirely or mostly in English, but – especially if your non-mother-tongue character is your point-of-view one – to explore the challenges that crop up when you’re operating in a different language.
How can you keep up with a fast-flowing conversation when you need a little more time to put a sentence together? How can you hold your own in an argument when you know you’re not explaining yourself as precisely as you would in your first language? Why has that perfectly standard word just gone clean out of your head?
Language fluency is a dynamic, multifaceted thing, and it varies hugely. Not just between individuals, but from moment to moment, too. Tiredness, stress, emotional overwhelm, alcohol intake, even the direction of the wind can affect how well you express yourself at any given time. And, especially in the early stages, there’s usually a gap between your passive understanding and your active command: you might understand perfectly well what people around you are saying, but be too slow or too shy to formulate a response then and there. I’m at that stage with Czech right now, and it’s both stressful and isolating.
Being a second-language speaker also influences how others hear you. You might have to work harder to convince those around you that you made a joke, not a mistake. People who were chatting away happily with you a moment ago might grind to a halt when you do make a mistake, because their estimation of your abilities suddenly changed. Some people – not all, but some – are even capable of speaking to you in your shared language before turning away and talking about you in that same language. Not everyone will do these things, but enough people will.
When you’re writing these scenes, you may find you want to bring in a little Italian, and that can work. Not a lot, though, and you should always find a way to gloss those sentences for the non-Italian-speaking reader. But you can do a surprising amount in English to show your character struggling with the language. Like this scene from my debut novel Escape to Florence, where my heroine Tori suddenly loses her appetite – and her fluency – in the middle of a plate of carbonara:
“‘What’s the matter?’ he asks. ‘Don’t you like it? Is there something wrong? I can make you a different dish, if you prefer.’
‘No, no.’ My Italian has scattered to the four winds. ‘I’m just … I don’t feel, I’m not feeling very …’
His eyes widen in alarm. ‘Are you ill?’
‘No, I’m not ill and don’t worry, the pasta is very good and I want to eat it but …’ Oh God, I’m babbling. ‘I saw something,’ I say, and feel foolish – because I didn’t see anything worth being upset about and yet here I am, upset. ‘Someone. I have … troubles. I’m sorry.’”
A handful of these moments in the course of the story can go a very long way to bringing the reader into your character’s world – and the new world they are striving to inhabit.
Note: If you do decide to incorporate Italian, and especially for your first-language characters, please don’t rely on AI. Even a fairly good translation tool like DeepL is only really reliable if you know the language already and can tweak the output to achieve the register you’re looking for. Checking with an Italian speaker is always the most reliable way, and they can often suggest nuances and expressions that will make your other Italian readers very happy. This is important anyway – but with English-language editions selling increasingly well in Europe, it’s also a practical measure.
Rule 3: Listen, Really Listen
But what if your scene doesn’t fit into any of the parameters above? What if everyone is speaking English, but one or more of your characters is a mother-tongue Italian speaker?
I’m giving this scenario a whole section of its own, because this one requires respect, understanding, and a lot of careful thought. And far too often it’s accorded none of these things.
Corny, phonetically rendered, cod-Italian accents. Randomly dropped-in foreign words. Comically “broken” English that never, ever varies or improves. Overuse of “Mamma mia!” and other stereotypical set phrases. These are the four horsemen of bad, insensitive and unconvincing dialogue.
When you set out to write your Italian character, a good first step is simply to listen to as many Italians speaking English as you possibly can. YouTube is a great resource for this! You’ll quickly get a sense of how diverse a population you are dealing with, and how rarely they fall into those hackneyed old linguistic stereotypes.
Above all, remember:
Italians speaking English are subject to all the forces I described in the section above: variable fluency, gaps between understanding and command, and bad-faith attitudes on the part of their audience.
Peppering their dialogue with Italian words won’t help reader understanding, and it will also come off as inauthentic and cheesy. Second-language speakers are much more likely to fall back on grammatical structures from their first language, or reach for easily available cognates (or false cognates), or simply stop and ask for directions than they are to switch languages in the middle of a sentence.
There is no universal English-learner experience. People learn in different contexts and in different ways, and they master the language to a varying extent. They might develop a specialist vocabulary, or gravitate to a specific register of English, or pick up idiosyncratic phrases from those around them.
That last point is especially key if you have more than one Italian-speaker in play. Your dialogue will instantly be much more authentic if your characters each have their own, personal and distinct voice.
Writing in this way is also simply much more fun. When working on Daughter of Genoa, I hugely enjoyed writing those conversations in English between my heroine Anna (a bilingual speaker from a Scots-Italian background, who is known to her resistance colleagues as Marta) and Father Vittorio (a Genoese priest who spent a period in London in the 1920s). Their different relationships with English create a little tension at first, but bring them closer over time as they develop a shared language:
“He’s packing up his bag when Marta speaks. ‘Father Vittorio,’ she begins, and he knows what she’s going to ask because she always asks it, won’t be deterred from asking it. ‘Father Vittorio, how are you feeling? You’re very quiet today. Are you all right?’
Vittorio looks down at the stole in his hand, and he mentally apologizes to Father Hugh: for lapsing in his discipline, and for borrowing his words to do it. ‘Of course I’m all right,’ he says. ‘I’m positively top-hole.’”
It takes time, compassion and research to write second-language speakers really well. But if you can do it, your characters and readers will thank you – and your story will gain new depths of meaning and insight.
Mamma mia, what a view!
Daughter of Genoa is out in the US on December 9, 2025. Father Vittorio and his phrases are waiting for you!