Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to use common Italian prepositions and correctly apply the mandatory fusion of prepositions with definite articles.

Lesson Explanation

Prepositions show relationships of place, time, or direction: in, su, sotto, tra/fra, con, senza (in, on, under, between, with, without).

The genuinely most distinctive fact in this lesson, with no Spanish or French equivalent of this scale: Italian’s simple prepositions (di, a, da, in, su) FUSE with the definite article that follows them into single words — called “preposizioni articolate”: a + il → al, di + il → del, in + la → nella, su + il → sul. This is genuinely mandatory, not optional style — writing “a il tavolo” instead of al tavolo is a real grammatical error.

The full pattern, following the article forms from Part 1, Lesson 2:

       il      lo      la      i       gli     le
a  →   al      allo    alla    ai      agli    alle
di →   del     dello   della   dei     degli   delle
da →   dal     dallo   dalla   dai     dagli   dalle
in →   nel     nello   nella   nei     negli   nelle
su →   sul     sullo   sulla   sui     sugli   sulle

Recall from Part 1, Lesson 2 that di plus the article also forms the partitive (“some”): del pane genuinely serves double duty, meaning either “of the bread” (in a possessive/descriptive sense) or “some bread” (partitive), with context distinguishing the two.

Practice Questions