What is Italian orthography?

Italian orthography uses a variant of the Latin alphabet consisting of 21 letters to write the Italian language. This article focuses on the writing of Standard Italian, based historically on the Florentine dialect.

Italian orthography is very regular and has an almost one-to-one correspondence between letters or sequences of letters and sounds or sequences of sounds, that is, it is almost a phonemic orthography. The main exceptions are that stress placement and vowel quality are not notated, ⟨s⟩ and ⟨z⟩ may be voiced or not, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ may represent vowels or semivowels, and a silent ⟨h⟩ is used in a very few cases other than the digraphs ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨gh⟩ used for the hard ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩ sounds before ⟨e⟩ and ⟨i⟩.