One of my Italian students from the United States asked me when to write words in upper case in Italian.
Many words that are capitalized in English are not capitalized in Italian. These include: the days of the week, the months of the year, proper adjectives, a few proper nouns, and titles such as Mr., Mrs., and Miss.
Arriva sabato. He is arriving on Saturday.
Il signor Rossi è italiano. Mr. Rossi is Italian.
Gli inglesi sono industriosi. The English are industrious/hard working.
More examples of when to use uppercase in Italian grammar
The Name of the Rose (both the book and the film) is Il nome della rosa.
I have an English Pronouncing Dictionary and a Dizionario d’ortografia e di pronuncia. With book titles we usually only capitalize the first word(unless, of course, the tile contains a proper noun – Guida alla città di Firenze).
Capital letters in polite forms of address are used as follows: In correspondence, both for the Lei (you) form and the Voi (you) form (Lei if the letter is sent to a specific person, Voi if the letter is sent to an entity or a company): for example ‘…la Vostra lettera‘ (your letter), ‘…per Voi‘ (for you), ‘…per porgerVi‘ (to give you), ‘…inviarLe‘ (to send you).
As a rule, proper names (Carlo, Paolo), town names (Cagliari, Napoli), countries, etc. are written with a capital. A capital letter is always inserted at the beginning of a sentence.
In headings/titles normally only the first word has a capital letter and the rest of the title is in lower case.
Days of the week/seasons/months are always in lower case. Words such as English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. which in English are always in upper case, are always written with lower case letter in Italian: inglese, italiano, spagnolo.
A capital letter is only used in Italian in expressions such as gli Inglesi, gli Italiani, i Romani, etc. to mean the English people, the Italian people, etc.
Please note: the word paese can mean ‘country’ OR ‘village/town’. To prevent misinterpretation, when the meaning ‘country’ is intended, Paese within a sentence can be written with a capital ‘P’.
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