Not surprisingly, Italian is the language spoken natively by most Italians.

You'll want a good phrasebook if you're going anywhere remote, although this may be less help in the smaller towns and villages, as many areas still speak local languages (like Neapolitan or Lombard for example) that you won't find in any phrasebook. Most younger Italians can speak Italian even in small towns and remote areas, however. Unlike in France (especially in Paris), Italians will be happy to hear you trying to speak Italian (or even better, the majority language in rural areas where it's not Italian), and will try to understand you even if you are making many mistakes. If you want your errors to be corrected to help you better learn the language, don't forget to ask before starting a conversation. Italians will rarely correct you otherwise as they consider it very impolite to do so, especially since it is a second language for many of them as opposed to their native languages. They also appreciate your efforts to speak their language and won't make too much fuss about your mistakes.

English is widely spoken on the well-travelled path, especially in touristic areas where it is widely spoken by sellers and tourist operators. In the cities you can often speak English with younger people, aged between 14 and 35: almost everyone has had to take English in school since the 1980s. At least the most basic phrases usually stick, and normally there's at least one person in a group with a decent command of English. On the other hand, senior citizens rarely know English, but they'll try to help you anyway with gestures or similar words. If you are going to speak in English, it is polite to ask, whether the person you speaks English before starting a conversation. Speaking English (and, more than English, speaking French) while taking for granted it will be understood can be considered very arrogant and impolite.

In the northern part of Italy, German is more widely understood than you might think, especially near the Austrian and Swiss borders, particularly in Bolzano, Trentino-Alto Adige (German: Bozen in Trentino-Südtirol) where the latter two are even the native language to a considerable population, though still very far from being universally understood. That is because those regions used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I.

The Romance languages Spanish, French and Portuguese, are not widely spoken but as they are similar to Italian Italians will recognize many words thus making yourself understood. There is a small French-speaking minority in the Valle d'Aosta region.

In the northern part of Italy, there are small pockets of other Romance languages like Ladin, a Rhaeto-Romance language related to Switzerland's Romansh. Friulano, another Rhaeto-Romance language, is still spoken by a small minority in the border province near Slovenia. There are several small pockets of Greek-speaking communities in the southern regions of Calabria and Puglia and there are an estimated 100,000 Albanian speakers in Puglia, Calabria and Sicily-some of which have migrated in Middle Ages and thus speak rather medieval Arberesh language. Italian and Slovene are official languages in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and Slovene is commonly spoken in areas surrounding Trieste with many of the small villages being entirely Slovene-speaking.