Asking for Directions

Getting lost in an Italian town takes about five minutes. Understanding the answer when you stop someone and ask for help is the skill that gets you moving again.

What this conversation covers

The dialog follows a visitor who has lost her way and a local who talks her through it. Along the way you meet dozens of useful words and phrases for saying you are lost, naming the place you want, asking how far it is, and taking in directions such as sempre dritto or a destra. The conversation then moves from the street to public transport, so the vocabulary of stops, tickets and getting off at the right place comes with it. These are the sentences you reach for in any Italian city, whether you are looking for a square, a museum or your own hotel.

How the practice works

You follow a realistic conversation as it unfolds and put sentences together word by word, with lookalike words mixed in to keep you honest. Every line is recorded by native Italian voices, so you are reading and listening at once and training your ear for the pace of real speech. Sessions are short, and you can come back and replay a quiz any time you want the phrases to settle.

Why Italians call strangers "she"

The polite form running through this whole conversation is Lei, which is also the ordinary Italian word for "she". It grew out of old honorific ways of addressing important people, expressions like Vostra Signoria that were grammatically feminine, and the grammar stuck even as the phrase itself faded. That is why a man you have never met is addressed as "she", why the verb drops into the third person in Dove vuole andare?, and why writers usually give the pronoun a capital letter to keep it apart from the everyday "she".