It is mid-September 2026, school started again two weeks ago, and in Year 3 of Italian high school the subject called Italian changes its job. Up to last year it was mostly grammar: from this year it becomes literary history and text analysis, and you start with the Stilnovo (the “sweet new style” of thirteenth-century love poetry), then Dante and Petrarch, all before Christmas. The first written test almost always comes between the end of October and the middle of November, three to six weeks from now, and it is a paraphrase plus analysis of a poem. It is the step that half the class trips on, every year.
Why the test changes and the textbook does not explain it
In the first two years, Italian was largely a subject of rules: grammatical analysis, sentence analysis, the essay. Whoever studied the grammar got by, because there was a chapter that taught it step by step. In Year 3 this is no longer enough: the programme becomes literary history, read from the texts and not from summaries, and the test changes with it. The test no longer asks you to recognise a complement. It asks you to take a poem, seen once in class or never seen, and give back its meaning in prose (the paraphrase), then explain how that meaning is built (the analysis). They are two different skills, and the anthology takes them almost for granted, unlike grammar. The typical result at the end of October is a paraphrase that is really a summary, or a word-for-word translation that does not stand up in Italian.
What the test really asks
A written Year 3 test on a poem almost always asks for two distinct pieces, in this order:
- Paraphrase: rewrite the text in ordinary Italian prose, without losing or adding anything, untangling the word order and the difficult vocabulary.
- Analysis: answer specific questions on metre, rhetorical devices, themes and, in the high schools that raise the bar, the link between form and content.
They are marked with different criteria, and it is better to know this before you write: the paraphrase is judged on faithfulness to the literal meaning, the analysis on the ability to argue an observation. Confusing the two, commenting inside the paraphrase or paraphrasing inside the analysis, is the quickest way to lose marks on both.
The mistakes that cost the most
In the order in which they come back every October:
- Paraphrasing without having understood. Replacing word by word without first asking “what is this stanza about”, and getting a sequence of synonyms that means nothing in Italian.
- Keeping the word order of the original text. The subject at the end of the line, the verb separated from its complements by a whole line: in poetry it works, in your prose the teacher marks it in red.
- Commenting inside the paraphrase. Slipping in “this shows that…” or “the author wants to say…” in a text that must be only the translation into prose. It is a mistake of text type, and it is penalised as such.
- Listing rhetorical devices without linking them to the meaning. Writing “there is an enjambement (a sentence running over the line break) at line 3” and stopping there is worth less than half of “there is an enjambement at line 3, which isolates the word X and gives it emphasis because it is the central concept of the stanza”. This is the step teachers reward most.
- Skipping the metre because “you can’t see it anyway”. The type of line and the rhyme scheme are often the first question of the test: you answer it in thirty seconds if you know how to count syllables, otherwise it is a mark left on the table.
The method, step by step
The paraphrase is built in a precise order. Skipping steps is what produces sentences that make no sense.
- Read the whole text at least twice before writing a word. The first aim is not the paraphrase: it is to understand the literal meaning, who is speaking, to whom, and about what. If you cannot answer these three questions, what you write afterwards will be a list of synonyms without logic.
- Untangle the word order. Italian poetry uses iperbato (hyperbaton) and anastrofe (anastrophe), the inversion of the “natural” order subject-verb-complements, for reasons of metre, rhyme or emphasis. The task is to find the three blocks (subject, verb, complements) wherever they are in the line, and put them back in plain order.
- Replace the archaic vocabulary. Words such as âre (aria, “air”), vèn (viene, “comes”), pote (può, “can”) and omo (uomo, “man”) must be translated into current Italian, not left as they are on the excuse that “you can understand them anyway”.
- Untangle circumlocutions and figures that hide the referent. If the text points to something with a roundabout phrase or an image, the paraphrase names it directly, keeping, if it is central, a hint of the image.
- Do not add, do not cut, do not comment, do not “poeticise”. A paraphrase is an act of faithfulness: it does not introduce interpretations that the text does not contain, it does not skip concepts that seem repetitive, and it does not use literary images of its own to “make it better”. If the original is repetitive, the paraphrase is too.
The real analysis: metre and rhetorical devices
Once the paraphrase is done, the analysis answers two kinds of questions: how the line is built (metre) and which rhetorical tools the text uses (figures of speech).
Metre: four forms to recognise at a glance
| Form | What it is |
|---|---|
| Endecasillabo (hendecasyllable) | a line of eleven syllables (counted by resolving the sinalefi, that is the merging of vowels between different words); it is the basic unit of Italian poetry from Dante onwards |
| Sonetto (sonnet) | 14 hendecasyllables: two quatrains (usually rhyming ABBA ABBA) and two tercets (variable scheme, often CDE CDE or CDC DCD) |
| Canzone of the Stilnovo | stanzas of hendecasyllables and settenari (seven-syllable lines), with a rhyme scheme fixed by the author for that single canzone; the “manifesto” form used by Guinizzelli and Cavalcanti |
| Dante’s terzina (terza rima) | Dante’s invention for the Commedia: interlocking rhyme ABA BCB CDC DED…, each tercet linked to the next by the middle rhyme |
Dante’s tercet is the one a test question falls on most often, because the interlocking scheme, in which the B rhyme of the first tercet becomes the A rhyme of the second, is the reason why the Commedia flows without a break from one canto to the next. Writing this, when relevant, is the kind of observation that moves a grade from 6 to 7.
The rhetorical devices worth recognising
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| Simile (similitudine) | explicit comparison, introduced by “come”, “quale”, “sì come” (like, as) |
| Metaphor | direct replacement of a term with an image, without the “like” |
| Synecdoche | the part for the whole or the whole for the part (e.g. “vela”, sail, for “nave”, ship) |
| Metonymy | the container for the contents, the cause for the effect, the author for the work |
| Anaphora | repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive lines or clauses |
| Chiasmus | two pairs of elements arranged in a mirror (order AB, then BA) |
| Enjambement | the sentence does not close at the end of the line but continues into the next line, breaking the expected metrical pause |
| Climax | a sequence of words or images of increasing intensity |
Knowing the names is not enough: the step that separates an analysis from a list is linking form to meaning, explaining why the author chose that very figure at that point, not just that he used it. This is what we try to do in the three examples that follow.
Three worked examples
1. Guinizzelli: hyperbaton, anaphora and chiasmus that say the same thing three times
Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore
come l’ausello in selva a la verdura;
né fe’ amor anti che gentil core,
né gentil core anti ch’amor, natura:
(Love always returns to the noble heart, as the bird to the greenery of the wood; nature did not make love before the noble heart, nor the noble heart before love.)
Paraphrase (in modern Italian): L’amore torna sempre a rifugiarsi nel cuore nobile, come l’uccello torna nel bosco, fra il verde; la natura non creò l’amore prima che esistesse il cuore nobile, né il cuore nobile prima che esistesse l’amore.
Analysis: The first line is built with a hyperbaton: the plain order would be “Amore rempaira sempre al cor gentil”, but Guinizzelli brings “al cor gentil” to the front, the key concept of the whole canzone, which is the manifesto of the Stilnovo (love exists only where there is nobility of soul). The form anticipates the content. In the next two lines the anaphora “né… né” sets the two halves of the idea in parallel, and the chiasmus amor / gentil core — gentil core / amor swaps the two words round exactly as, in the concept they express, love and the noble heart are inseparable: the syntax acts out the idea before it even explains it.
2. Dante: the enjambement that suspends the pain
Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria; e ciò sa ‘l tuo dottore.
(There is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in misery; and your teacher knows this.)
Paraphrase (in modern Italian): Non c’è dolore più grande che ricordarsi del tempo felice quando si è nella sventura; e questo lo sa bene il tuo maestro (Virgilio).
Analysis: This is one of the most quoted enjambements in the Commedia. The first line closes on the word “dolore”, but the sense does not close at all: greater pain than what? The answer arrives only in the next line, “che ricordarsi del tempo felice”. The sentence leaps over the pause you would expect at the end of the line, and that leap reproduces on the page the same painful suspension that Francesca speaks of: the memory of happiness does not close at once, it stays suspended, just like the line.
3. Cavalcanti: the question that cannot finish
Chi è questa che vèn, ch’ogn’om la mira,
che fa tremar di chiaritate l’âre,
e mena seco Amor, sì che parlare
null’omo pote, ma ciascun sospira?
(Who is this woman who comes, whom everyone gazes at, who makes the air tremble with brightness, and brings Love with her, so that no man can speak, but everyone sighs?)
Paraphrase (in modern Italian): Chi è questa donna che arriva, che tutti guardano, che fa tremare l’aria per la sua luminosità, e porta con sé Amore, cosicché nessun uomo riesce a parlare, ma ciascuno sospira?
Analysis: First the vocabulary: vèn is “viene” (comes), âre is “aria” (air), null’omo pote is “nessun uomo può” (no man can). Once this is done, you see that the opening quatrain of the sonnet is one single question, four lines long, never answered within it: the interrogative syntax that stretches across the whole quatrain reproduces the amazement of whoever looks at the woman and cannot say anything (“null’omo pote… parlare”). The hyperbole “fa tremar di chiaritate l’âre” is the typical Stilnovo motif of the woman who has physical effects on the world around her: here the form, a single sentence, suspended, without an answer, and the content, the inability to speak in front of her, say the same thing.
How we work on this, in lessons
With students in Year 3 who face the first paraphrase test, the order we follow is always the same: first the paraphrase on its own, with no analysis questions, until it is clean: faithful, in current Italian, with no comments slipped in. Only afterwards do we move on to the rhetorical devices, and we always train the same reflex: not “what figure is this” but “why did the author use it here”. It is the question the test really asks.
The second exercise that works is working on texts never seen, not only on those explained in class: you train paraphrase by understanding a new text, not by remembering the one already done in a lesson. The same principle applies when in Year 3 maths and physics also change pace, same term, same feeling of a step up. We wrote about this in the first physics test of Year 3: the problem is almost never “I understood nothing”, it is that you have not yet made automatic the method that the subject asks of you from this year.
Lessons are online and one-to-one, one hour at a time: you will find up-to-date rates and packages on the pricing page. If you have not worked with us yet, you can book the free 30-minute introductory call to work out where to restart. You will find the full picture for Italian, history, philosophy and the other humanities subjects on the page for the humanities subjects.
If at this time it is not only Italian that is wobbling but also maths or physics, on the site you will find the practice tests of high school maths and physics. To be honest, they are practice tests of maths and physics, not of Italian, but they help you see whether the problem at the start of this Year 3 is only Italian or the change of pace that touches several subjects together. The correct answer to each question is free; the step-by-step guided solution unlocks with your first lesson.
To understand the structure of long sentences, you need the method of clause analysis. And for commenting on a literary text in a foreign language, English, there is the post on commentary in Year 3 of a language high school.
If you want an opinion on how your child’s first Italian test is going, or on where to restart after a low grade, write to us: the first thing we look at is the paraphrase they wrote, not the grade.
