Di with Nouns and Adjectives

The previous page covered Italian verbs that take di + infinitive. This page handles the parallel territory of nouns and adjectives that govern di. Italian, like English, often follows an emotional or evaluative noun or adjective with a complement: paura di (fear of), bisogno di (need of), capace di (capable of), stanco di (tired of), innamorato di (in love with). The Italian construction is highly productive, and the choice of di (rather than a, con, per, etc.) is again lexically fixed for each item.

Three things make this page essential. First, several of the most frequent Italian nouns — bisogno, paura, voglia — only appear with di. Second, a large class of adjectives describing emotion and capability requires di: contento, stanco, capace, sicuro, pieno, ricco, orgoglioso, innamorato. Third — and this is the killer — Italian has an obligatory qualcosa di + adjective pattern (something beautiful, nothing serious) that English handles without any preposition at all. Forgetting the di in qualcosa di bello is the single most common preposition error in English-speaker Italian.

1. Nouns that govern di: the high-frequency list

These are the abstract nouns that appear most often with a di complement. Many of them double as components of avere-expressions (avere bisogno di, avere paura di, avere voglia di), already covered in Di with Verbs. Here we focus on the noun's behavior in any context — as a subject, object, complement, or modifier of another noun.

The pattern noun + di + infinitive (the right to vote, the chance to win, the habit of waking early) is one of the most productive in Italian. Whenever you have an abstract noun expressing a state, capability, or expectation, the complement is almost always introduced by di.

A subtle alternation: amore di vs. amore per. Amore di tends to express the source (the love coming from someone — l'amore di Dio often means "God's love for us") or the abstract beloved (l'amore di patria = love of country). Amore per unambiguously names the recipient (l'amore per la musica = love for music, il mio amore per te = my love for you). In modern usage, amore per is the safer choice when the beloved is a specific person or activity; amore di is more idiomatic for abstract goals (amore di patria, amore di verità).

2. Bisogno, voglia, paura — the three indispensable nouns

Three nouns deserve their own section because they appear in everyday speech constantly: bisogno (need), voglia (desire), paura (fear). All three combine with avere to form predicate expressions, and all three take di.

Italian leans on these avere + abstract noun constructions where English uses verbs (need, want, fear). They are essential idiomatic patterns; an Italian conversation without them is unimaginable.

The negation pattern is non avere bisogno/voglia/paura di: Non ho bisogno di te (I don't need you), Non ho voglia di parlare (I don't feel like talking), Non ho paura di niente (I'm not afraid of anything).

3. Adjectives that govern di: the high-frequency list

Italian has a substantial set of adjectives that require di before their complement. These cluster around three semantic fields: emotion / state, capability / quality, and content / fullness.

Emotion and state

A few notes:

• Innamorato di is non-negotiable. In English, you fall in love with someone; in Italian, you are in love of them: innamorato di Maria, innamorato di te. Spanish speakers and English speakers consistently make the con-error here.
• Geloso di can mean "jealous of (someone)" in the sense of envying them, or "protectively jealous of (one's possessions, partner)". The preposition is di in both readings.
• Annoiato can take di (bored of a thing) or da (bored by an external annoyance, slightly more formal): annoiato dalla pioggia (bothered by the rain).

Capability and quality

The expression sicuro di sé (sure of oneself, self-confident) deserves a note: it uses the reflexive disjunctive sé, not se stesso (which is also correct but heavier). Sicuro di sé is the everyday phrase for "self-confident."

Content / fullness / abundance

The contrast circondato di vs. circondato da is interesting: circondato di tends to mean "surrounded by (positive, supportive things)" — circondato di amici, di affetto; circondato da tends to mean "surrounded by (a hostile or external force)" — circondato dai nemici, da una nube. The line is fuzzy and many speakers use them interchangeably, but the di version often carries a slightly warmer connotation.

4. The qualcosa / niente / qualcuno / nessuno + di + adjective pattern

This is the killer pattern. Italian requires di between an indefinite pronoun (qualcosa, niente, qualcuno, nessuno) and a following adjective. English speakers, who never insert a preposition in something beautiful, nothing important, someone special, drop the di and produce ungrammatical Italian.

The rule is uniform across all four indefinites:

The adjective is always masculine singular, regardless of the speaker's gender or the surrounding context. Qualcosa and niente are grammatically indefinite and treated as masculine singular by default; qualcuno / nessuno take their masculine singular form when the referent is unspecified.

The pattern is obligatory, not optional. Forgetting the di is one of the most diagnostic errors of an English speaker's Italian — even at upper-intermediate levels, this preposition gets dropped. Once you internalize qualcosa-di and niente-di as units (the way you internalize kind of, sort of in English), you stop forgetting it.

Why this pattern requires di

The Italian construction is structurally similar to un libro di storia (a history book — literally "a book of history"). Qualcosa di bello is "something of beauty," with the di introducing an attribute as a kind of partitive specification. The English counterpart simplified to a bare adjective; Italian retained the historical preposition.

This historical insight has no practical relevance — you still must say qualcosa di bello — but it explains why the construction "feels right" in Italian: the di marks the adjective as a specifier of the indefinite pronoun, in the same way that di storia specifies libro.

5. Companion pattern: qualcosa / niente da + infinitive

Closely related and equally obligatory: the qualcosa da + infinitive pattern, meaning "something to do." Here the preposition is da, not di, because the infinitive expresses purpose or function rather than attribution.

So Italian has a tidy two-way contrast:

• Qualcosa di + adjective = something + attribute (something beautiful)
• Qualcosa da + infinitive = something + purpose (something to do)

You can chain them: qualcosa di buono da mangiare (something good to eat), qualcosa di interessante da leggere (something interesting to read).

6. Adjective + di + infinitive (chained constructions)

Several adjectives that take di + noun also take di + infinitive, with the same semantic relationship.

The infinitive can also be a past infinitive (aver + past participle) when the action is already complete: contento di averti rivisto (happy to have seen you again), sicuro di aver fatto bene (sure to have done well).

7. Distinguishing di from a and con with adjectives

Several adjectives in this group are confused by learners with English equivalents that take a different preposition. Here are the high-impact contrasts.

The pattern: most evaluative and emotional adjectives describing a relationship to a person take con (gentile con, arrabbiato con, sposato con, buono con). Adjectives describing a state or property of the speaker with respect to a thing/person take di (innamorato di, stanco di, contento di, sicuro di, geloso di). The boundaries are fuzzy in places, but this rough split helps.

8. Comparison: how Italian differs from English

The English speaker's intuitions are misleading at several points:

1. Bare adjective after something/nothing. English: something beautiful, nothing serious. Italian: qualcosa di bello, niente di grave. The di is mandatory in Italian.
2. Of vs. with vs. at. English uses with in in love with and angry with; Italian uses di in innamorato di but con in arrabbiato con. The English preposition is no guide.
3. To vs. of. English: happy to see you. Italian: contento di vederti. Italian uses di for the infinitive complement; English uses to.
4. Possessive of. English: Marco's book (Saxon genitive). Italian: il libro di Marco. Both use of-like, but Italian requires the article on libro and the di between possessor and possessed; the order is fixed.
5. The piene di / ricco di family. English: full of, rich in, poor in. Italian uses di throughout, regardless of the English preposition.

For Spanish speakers the alignment is much closer — Spanish uses de in most of the same positions where Italian uses di. The main residual traps for Spanish speakers are innamorato di (Spanish enamorado de — same), qualcosa di bello (Spanish algo bonito without de — different), and the contento di + infinitive pattern.

9. Common mistakes

The errors English speakers (and others) make most often.

10. The summary table

The complete map of di-governing nouns and adjectives, organized for memorization.

This is roughly 50 lexical items. Drilled in groups, they are memorizable in a few weeks, and they cover the great majority of Italian sentences in which a di governs a noun or adjective.

Where to go next

• Di with Verbs — the parallel page for di + infinitive verb constructions.
• The Preposition Di: Overview — the broader picture of di's twelve uses.
• Prepositions: Overview — the architectural map of the entire Italian preposition system.
• Pronouns: Overview — qualcosa, niente, qualcuno, nessuno in the indefinite-pronoun section.
• Preposizioni Articolate — the contraction grid that produces del, della, dei whenever di meets a definite article.