Italy Emoji & Symbols

🇮🇹 the Italy flag emoji shows il Tricolore: three vertical bands of green, white and red, green at the flagpole. The colours first flew as a national flag on 7 January 1797, when the Cispadane Republic adopted them in Reggio Emilia; that date is now Italy's Flag Day, the Festa del Tricolore. The plain version without the royal Savoy coat of arms has been the flag since Italy became a republic in 1946. A popular reading gives the colours as hope, faith and charity, or as the green plains, the snow of the Alps and the blood of the wars of independence; the Constitution itself only describes the three bands.

The emoji is not a picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator letters, 🇮 and 🇹, the country code IT. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag; Windows has no country flags in its emoji font, so it shows the letters IT, while a friend on a phone still sees 🇮🇹. Italy was one of only ten flags in the original Japanese phone emoji, together with Japan, the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, China and South Korea, and those ten were encoded with regional indicators in Unicode 6.0 in 2010.

Where flags do not show, people write the colours: 💚🤍❤️ in hearts or 🟩⬜🟥 in squares. Do not mix 🇮🇹 up with 🇮🇪 Ireland, which is green, white and orange, or 🇲🇽 Mexico, which has an eagle in the middle. 🇻🇦 Vatican City and 🇸🇲 San Marino are independent countries entirely surrounded by Italy, and 🇪🇺 joins 🇮🇹 for anything about the European Union, whose forerunner Italy helped found with the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

Italian hand emoji 🤌 and other Italian gestures

🤌 the Italian hand emoji, officially Pinched Fingers, arrived in Emoji 13.0 in 2020 and quickly became closely associated with Italy. In Italy the gesture, fingertips pressed together and the hand shaken up and down, means ma che vuoi? or ma che dici?, "what do you want?", "what are you talking about?": impatience, disbelief or a demand to get to the point. Outside Italy it is often read as a "chef's kiss" or "perfect", and people pair it with 😘 for that; Italians themselves say a dish is good with a different gesture, a forefinger twisted into the cheek, which has no emoji.

The downward-pointed fare le corna gesture wards off bad luck, like knocking on wood (Italians say tocca ferro); 🤘 is only an approximate emoji stand-in. Aimed at a person, though, the same horns call him a cornuto, a man whose partner cheats on him, so use it with care. The red twisted horn amulet of Naples, the cornicello or cornetto, has no emoji; 🌶️ is a common stand-in, and it fits "Italian horn emoji" and "Italian symbols for good luck" searches.

Italian food emoji: pizza, pasta, coffee and wine

🍕 comes first. Neapolitan pizza is Italy's pride, and the craft of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo was added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2017. The story goes that the pizza Margherita was named in 1889 for Queen Margherita, with tomato, mozzarella and basil, 🍅🧀🌿, for the colours of the flag. 🍝 covers every pasta; 🥟 does for ravioli and tortellini, 🥚🥓🧀 is a carbonara (guanciale, egg, pecorino and pepper, never cream) and 🌿🧄🫒 is pesto from Genoa. 🧑‍🍳 is the chef and 🍽️ says buon appetito.

Regional favourites have their stand-ins: 🐃 for mozzarella di bufala, made from water-buffalo milk in Campania; 🥩 for the bistecca alla fiorentina; 🐗 for wild boar, cinghiale, in Tuscany; 🍄‍🟫 for porcini and the truffles of Alba; 🫓 for focaccia and piadina; 🍋 for the lemons and limoncello of the Amalfi Coast; 🍊 for the blood oranges of Sicily. There is no tiramisù, panna cotta or cannoli emoji, so 🍰 and 🍮 fill in, and 🍨🍦 is gelato.

☕ is an espresso, simply un caffè in Italy, drunk standing at the bar with 🥐, the breakfast cornetto; cappuccino is a morning drink. Evenings start with the aperitivo: 🍹 for the orange spritz of the Veneto, 🍸 for a Negroni, 🥂 for cin cin! and 🍾 for prosecco. 🍷🍇 is the wine country of Chianti, Barolo and Montepulciano.

Italy emoji for Rome, Venice, Florence and beyond

Few Italian landmarks have an emoji of their own, so people borrow. 🏟️ is the usual Colosseum emoji and 🏛️ the Pantheon and the Forum, with ⚔️ for the gladiators and 🏺 for the amphorae of Pompeii. ⛲ is the Trevi Fountain, where you throw a coin 🪙 over your shoulder to make sure you return to Rome, and 🐺 is the she-wolf who fed Romulus and Remus. In Venice 🛶 stands in for a gondola, 🦁 for the winged lion of Saint Mark and 🎭 for the masks of Carnevale; in Florence ⚜️ is the nearest match to the city's red lily, the giglio, and 🎨🖼️ is the Renaissance of the Uffizi. The Leaning Tower of Pisa has no emoji at all.

🌋 is Vesuvius above Naples, which buried Pompeii in AD 79, or Etna in Sicily, the highest active volcano in Europe. 🏔️ is the Alps and the Dolomites, 🏞️ the lakes of Como, Garda and Maggiore, 🌻 the summer sunflower fields of Tuscany and Umbria, and 🏘️ the coloured houses of the Cinque Terre and Burano. 🏖️🌊🏝️⛵ is summer by the sea in Sardinia, Sicily, Capri or Puglia. 🚄 is the high-speed Frecciarossa, which runs Milan to Rome in about three hours, and 🛵 the Vespa, built by Piaggio since 1946; its name is Italian for "wasp".

Music is written in Italian, which is why 🎼 goes with 🇮🇹: piano, forte, allegro and crescendo are Italian words, and opera grew up here, from Monteverdi to Verdi and Puccini. 🎻 is Cremona, the city of Stradivari's violins; 🎹 the piano, invented in Florence around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori; 🪗 the accordion of Castelfidardo; 🎤 the Sanremo song festival, held since 1951. 🔭 is Galileo, who turned his telescope on Jupiter's moons from Padua in 1610, and 👗👠👜 is Milan fashion week.

Italian holidays, sports and the emoji people send

At Christmas 🎄 sits next to panettone and pandoro, which have no emoji. On 6 January the Befana 🧙🧹, a kind old witch on a broomstick, fills children's stockings with sweets, and with coal for the naughty ones. Easter, Pasqua, brings 🕊️ for the colomba, a cake baked in the shape of a dove, and 🐣🥚 for chocolate eggs with a surprise inside. On 8 March, Women's Day, women are given sprigs of yellow mimosa 🌼; 2 June, Republic Day, ends with the Frecce Tricolori jets ✈️ trailing green, white and red smoke over Rome; 15 August, Ferragosto, is 🏖️☀️; and New Year, Capodanno, is 🎆🍾.

⚽ is calcio, Italy's first love. The national team are the Azzurri 💙, in blue, the colour of the House of Savoy, and they have won the World Cup four times (1934, 1938, 1982 and 2006, so 🏆🏆🏆🏆) and the European Championship in 1968 and 2020 (played in 2021). 🏎️🐎 is Ferrari and its prancing horse, cheered by the tifosi at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza; 🏍️ is Ducati and MotoGP; 🚴🩷 is the Giro d'Italia, raced since 1909, whose leader wears the pink maglia rosa because the Gazzetta dello Sport, which founded it, is printed on pink paper. 🎾 has boomed since Jannik Sinner became the first Italian man ranked world No. 1 in 2024; 🏐 is volleyball, where Italy's women won Olympic gold in Paris in 2024; 🤺 is fencing, Italy's most successful Olympic sport; ⛷️ is skiing in the Dolomites; Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo co-hosted the 2026 Winter Olympics; and 🏇 is the Palio di Siena, a bareback horse race round the Piazza del Campo on 2 July and 16 August.

One recent arrival is Italian brainrot: the AI-made characters with mock-Italian names that went viral in 2025. They have no emoji, so fans build them from pieces: 🦈👟 for Tralalero Tralala, a shark in sneakers; 🐊✈️ for Bombardiro Crocodilo; 🩰☕ for Ballerina Cappuccina; 🐒🍌 for Chimpanzini Bananini.

Euro sign €, lira symbol ₤ and Italian accent letters

Italy pays in euros, written with the euro sign €: shops show € 10,50 or 10,50 €, always with a decimal comma and a dot for thousands (€ 1.250,00). On an Italian keyboard type € with AltGr+E; on Windows also Alt+0128, on a U.S.-layout Mac Option+Shift+2. The euro replaced the lira in 1999, and in cash in 2002, at 1,936.27 lire to the euro. The Italian lira symbol is ₤, a capital L with two bars; in daily life Italians mostly wrote L. or the pound-style £ before the amount, as in L. 1.000. Italy's own euro coins carry its art: Leonardo's Vitruvian Man 🪙 on the 1 € and Raphael's portrait of Dante on the 2 €.

Italian needs only six accented letters, à è é ì ò ù, and the accent marks a stressed final vowel: città, perché, più, così, caffè. It also tells words apart: è "is" and e "and", là "there" and la "the", sì "yes" and si "oneself", dà "gives" and da "from". The grave accent is the usual one; the acute appears mainly on é, the closed e of perché, poiché and né. The Italian keyboard has keys for è é à ò ì ù but none for the capitals, which is why Italians often type E' instead of È. On Windows use Alt+0200 for È, 0192 for À, 0204 for Ì, 0210 for Ò, 0217 for Ù and 0201 for É (small: 0224 à, 0232 è, 0233 é, 0236 ì, 0242 ò, 0249 ù); on a U.S.-layout Mac, press Option+` then the letter for a grave accent, Option+E then the letter for an acute; on a phone, long-press the vowel. Italian quotes are the caporali « » or curly “ ”, and ordinals use º and ª: 1º primo, 1ª prima.

Italian is the language of nearly the whole country, spoken by an estimated 58 million of Italy's roughly 59 million people, and many also speak a regional language such as Lombard, Venetian, Piedmontese, Ligurian, Neapolitan, Sicilian or Sardinian. German is official in South Tyrol, French in the Aosta Valley, and Slovenian is spoken near Trieste; see the German, French and Slovenian collections for their letters, and the Italian collection for the full alphabet.