Bantam/Italian/Dict.

This is the absolute BEST Italian-English dictionary I have ever found! In the last 25 years, living and working in Italy I have literally consumed 5 copies. It has 95% of the vocabulary I have ever needed.

I have been buying this dictionary for my high school students for the last 3 years. Not only is it economical but it has more words than the average high school student studying Italian can handle. Easy to use for teens.

From the publication particulars, I can see that this dictionary came out just as I was making my first trip to Italy. I must have bought it that time. Anyway I've had it long enough so that the first 24 pages (also the last few) have long since fallen off, worn away by repeated and stuffing and unstuffing into (out of) a travel pack. It has always been, and remains, indispensable: the Swiss Army Knife of Italian dictionaries. Or better, perhaps, like the TI BA-II calculator: same old boring format and framework, same dependable performance. Indeed, I bought another pocket Italian dictionary a couple of years back (why?). It's probably perfectly fine, but somehow I keep coming back to this packworn original, while the new one reposes silently on the shelf. I would like to, but cannot honestly, say that I am fluent in Italian: most of the time, when I try to speak it in a shop, they just answer in English and save everyone the trouble. But I can dope my way through the newspapers and a simple novel or two. And for this--here's a five-star salute to my companion of 20-plus years.

By now I speak Italian well enough to be called, by Italians, fluent, and in fact I've given a few lectures in Italian. I say that only to suggest that I've been around the block with Italian/English dictionaries and far and away this one has served me best. Only very rarely does it fail me and not have a necessary word or idiom, but otherwise this packed pocketbook is almost mystic in its sense of what American students of Italian need. First-rate: you need to spend a hundred bucks to do better, and how often do you want to lug down, or out, a book that size

This is the dictionary you should buy if you are an American. Many Italian-English dictionaries use the British English, and this is inaccurate for our uses. This is easy to use and includes conjugated verbs and grammar tables.