The Preposition Di: Overview

Di is the most versatile preposition in Italian and the single most frequent — roughly one in four prepositional uses in everyday Italian is a di. It is also the one with the worst English mapping: depending on context, di covers "of, from, about, by, in (time), some" and several uses that English handles without any preposition at all. There is no clean translation rule. Instead, this page walks you through di's twelve major uses, gives you the contractions and the elision pattern, and shows where di contrasts with da, a, and other prepositions that learners often confuse with it.

If you only learn one Italian preposition perfectly, learn this one. The depth of di's territory means that mastering it takes months, but every chunk you absorb pays off in dozens of sentences a day.

1. The twelve uses of di at a glance

The full inventory:

Each row is a self-contained construction. Read the page once for the inventory, then come back and absorb each use individually.

2. Possession

This is the first use most learners meet, and it has a structure that surprises English speakers: Italian has no Saxon genitive. There is no equivalent of English Marco's book — Italian must say il libro di Marco, literally "the book of Marco." The order is fixed: the possessed item comes first, di, then the possessor.

When the possessor is preceded by a definite article, di contracts with the article: il libro di + il professore = il libro del professore. This is one of the most common contractions in Italian.

For pronominal possession (mine, yours, his), Italian uses possessive adjectives (il mio, la sua, i nostri) instead of di + pronoun. Di me, di te exist but mean something different — emphatic or partitive, not possessive.

3. Material and composition

To say what something is made of, Italian uses di + the material noun. The material noun is bare — no article — because it is treated as a generic substance.

Note the elision d'oro (= di oro) — di drops its vowel before another vowel. This is treated in section 14 below.

A modern alternative is in + material: una casa in mattoni, un anello in oro. Both are correct; in is slightly more common in commercial or technical contexts (jewelry catalogs, real-estate descriptions), while di is the everyday default in speech.

4. Origin: with essere, use di

To say where someone is from — meaning their hometown or place of origin, in the biographical sense — Italian uses essere di + city or region.

This is one of the few cases in Italian where you must distinguish di (origin/biography) from da (motion/source). Compare:

• Sono di Roma — I'm from Rome (it's where I'm from).
• Vengo da Roma — I'm coming from Rome (this trip, just now).
• Sono partito da Roma — I left from Rome.

The core rule: with essere + place of origin, use di. With verbs of motion (venire, partire, arrivare, tornare), use da to mark the source of the motion. Mixing them produces Sono da Roma, which sounds like an answer to "where are you arriving from?" rather than "where do you come from?"

5. Topic: "about"

To talk about a subject, Italian uses di with verbs of speaking, thinking, and writing.

The same construction extends to nouns: un libro di storia (a history book), un film di guerra (a war film), una conferenza di filosofia (a philosophy conference). These compound nouns are everywhere in Italian and are built on di + bare topic noun.

A subtle distinction: when the topic is what someone is thinking about, Italian uses pensare a, not pensare di (which means "to plan to"). This is a real lexical-specificity trap — see Di with Verbs for the contrast.

For "a book about World War II," both un libro sulla seconda guerra mondiale (with su) and un libro della seconda guerra mondiale are heard, with subtle nuance: su suggests a treatise on the topic, di suggests a book of / whose subject is the topic. Su is more common in academic contexts.

6. Quantity and the partitive specification

When a noun expresses a quantity or measure of something, the substance follows in di + bare noun.

The quantity word — un po', un chilo, un bicchiere — agrees as a noun in its own right; the substance after di is bare (no article).

Note the orthography of un po' (a bit). The apostrophe is mandatory: po' is a truncation of poco and the apostrophe marks the dropped -co. Writing un po without the apostrophe is a common spelling error and looks careless to native speakers.

7. Comparison: più di and meno di

Italian uses di before nouns and numbers in comparative constructions, where English uses than.

The choice between di and che in comparatives is a common stumbling block:

• Di before a noun, pronoun, or number when comparing two different things on a single quality: Lui è più giovane di me (he is younger than me).
• Che when the comparison is between two qualities of the same subject, or between two verbs, or before a preposition: È più stanco che affamato (he is more tired than hungry); Mi piace più leggere che scrivere (I prefer reading to writing); È più bello a Roma che a Milano (it's nicer in Rome than in Milan).

A useful rule of thumb: if both sides of the comparison can be replaced by a single noun, use di. If they cannot — if you are comparing two adjectives, two infinitives, or anything connected by a preposition — use che.

The Spanish-style que is a frequent transfer error. Italian never uses que in comparatives.

8. Specification of a container's content

Closely related to use 6 but worth separating: when a noun specifies the content of a container or measure, Italian uses di.

The fixed phrase un sacco di (literally "a sack of") is a productive intensifier meaning "a lot of": un sacco di amici (lots of friends), un sacco di tempo (lots of time), un sacco di problemi (lots of problems). Use it freely — it's everyday colloquial Italian.

9. Verb + di + infinitive

Many Italian verbs take di before a following infinitive. This is a major lexical-specificity area; a partial list:

This list is treated in detail in Di with Verbs. For now, internalize that di is the connector between many high-frequency verbs and the infinitive that follows.

10. The partitive article: del, della, dei, delle

When di contracts with a definite article, the result can mean either "of the" (genuine di meaning) or "some / any" (the partitive article). The forms are identical; context tells you which is meant.

The partitive article is treated separately, but it's important to recognize that del pane in "compro del pane" (I'm buying some bread) is the same form as del pane in "il prezzo del pane" (the price of the bread). One construction does double duty.

11. Time expressions

Di introduces several common time expressions, especially parts of the day and seasons.

The forms before vowels — d'inverno, d'estate, d'autunno — show the elision of di to d'. The form di mattina is also written la mattina, and both are used for habitual mornings; di mattina tends to specify in the morning as a time-of-day adverbial, while la mattina often functions as a noun phrase ("the morning is...").

For days of the week, di + day indicates a habitual action: di domenica vado in chiesa (I go to church on Sundays). For a specific Sunday, use the bare day: domenica andiamo al mare (this Sunday we're going to the beach).

12. Cause

A poetic but real use of di: to express the cause of an emotion or physical state. This pattern is common with verbs of feeling, dying, and laughing.

Most of these are fixed expressions — replacing di with another preposition produces something noticeably wrong.

13. Authorship: a book by X

For authorship of a book, painting, song, or film, Italian uses di.

English's "by" maps to di in this authorial sense; Italian da (which English speakers might guess from by) is wrong here. Da is used for the agent in passive constructions ("the painting was made by Caravaggio" → il dipinto è stato fatto da Caravaggio), but for the simple noun "a painting by X," Italian uses di.

14. The contractions: del / dello / dell' / della / dei / degli / delle

When di meets a definite article, the two fuse mandatorily.

These seven forms are obligatory in every register. Di il libro and di la casa are ungrammatical — the contraction must happen.

15. Elision: di → d' before vowels

Before a word starting with a vowel, di often elides to d', with an apostrophe replacing the dropped vowel. This is optional but very common.

The elision is not mandatory, the way the contractions in section 14 are. In writing, both d'amore and di amore are correct. In speech, the elided form is more frequent because it flows better — d'amore is one syllable shorter than di amore and that matters in everyday rhythm. Set expressions like un anello d'oro and una storia d'amore are virtually always written elided.

A subtle point: after the contracted forms (del, della, dei), no further elision happens because the article has already absorbed the vowel: dell'amore (di + l' + amore — the l' is the elided article, not di). Don't try to elide the di in dell' further.

16. Di vs. da: the most confusing distinction for English speakers

The trickiest contrast in the Italian preposition system is di vs. da. Both can correspond to English "from," and English speakers often reach for da when di is correct.

The rule of thumb:

• Di = static origin, biographical (where someone is from as a fact about them).
• Da = motion source (where motion starts), agent (in passive voice), and "at someone's place."

The diagnostic question: is this about where motion begins (then da), or a static property of the noun (then di)? This solves most cases.

17. Common mistakes

These are the recurring errors English speakers make with di.

18. Summary table: every use, with one example

If you can match each Italian phrase in this table to its use category without thinking, you have internalized di at the level of a confident B1 speaker.

Where to go next

• Di with Verbs — the complete list of high-frequency verbs that take di + infinitive and di + noun, with a memorable grouping.
• Di with Nouns and Adjectives — the noun and adjective lexemes that govern di, including the obligatory qualcosa di + adjective pattern.
• The Preposition A: Overview — the second-most-common Italian preposition, with the verbs that take a + infinitive (the natural counterpart to di + infinitive).
• Preposizioni Articolate — the full grid of contracted forms, including the del, della, dei row.
• Prepositions: Overview — the map of the entire Italian preposition system, where di sits at the center.