Things to know about Italian
Italian is a Romance language, a direct descendant of the Latin spoken in the Roman Empire. It is spoken in Italy, and also serves as a minority language in a number of other countries.
Typing Italian Characters
Italian is written in the Latin alphabet. However, it also uses characters with diacritic marks, including à, é, è, ì, ò, and ù, to indicate various aspects of pronunciation. There are two methods for typing these characters.
The simplest method is to use the character suggestions. To do so, type the base character for the letter you want, then select the special character from the set of characters which appears.
The other method is to use the virtual keyboard with the layout set to Italian. (If necessary, you can change the layout by clicking 
and selecting an option in the Keyboard Language menu.)
Locate the character you want on the virtual keyboard, then click on it or press the corresponding key on your physical keyboard. This layout provides access to certain common special characters, such as à, è, ì, ò, and ù. Other characters are available through various combinations of keys - for example, é appears on the virtual keyboard when you hold down the Shift key. Capital letters and certain punctuation marks, such as the question mark, are also available by holding down the Shift key.
See Typing Accents and Special Characters for details on both typing methods.