Find pen pals in Italy

Italy is a country where almost everyone abroad has been a tourist and almost nobody has been a neighbour, and the difference between those two Italies is what makes Italian pen pals worth writing to.

The letters cover the parts the holiday misses: how strongly regional identity runs, and how a Sicilian and a Milanese describe each other; the bureaucracy that is a national sport; why young Italians move north or leave entirely; what an actual weekday dinner looks like as opposed to a restaurant menu abroad; and the fact that "Italian food" is not a cuisine but about twenty of them, each convinced the others are doing it wrong.

For learners, Italian is one of the friendlier languages to take up by letter. The spelling is phonetic, the vocabulary is guessable from English and other Romance languages, and progress in the first months is fast enough to keep you going. What is worth having corrected is the small stuff — prepositions, the passato prossimo versus imperfetto, the register that separates textbook Italian from how anyone actually writes.

Italian members tend to be warm and quick to make an exchange personal, which is lovely and occasionally intense if you are used to more reserved correspondence. It is not romantic interest — this is not a dating site and there is no dating category — it is simply how friendliness is expressed.

Ask what their town is known for locally, what they eat that would horrify a foreign "Italian" restaurant, what they think of how their country is portrayed abroad, or what they do on a Sunday. Ask about their region's dialect: nearly everyone has an opinion.

Free for everyone, with adults and under-18s kept entirely separate. Filter Discover by Italy and write.