Using Italian Adjectives Inside of a Sentence

What is an adjective? 

It’s a word that you can use to describe a person or a thing. 

For example, bello beautiful, brutto (ugly), grande (big) - piccolo (small), big, intelligente (smart), stupido (stupid)… colors can also be adjectives…. rosso (red), giallo (yellow), blu (blue) and so on.

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In English if you are describing me you would say: Giulia has brown hair.

So your adjective will go before the noun - The adjective is brown and the noun is hair. 

In this sentence you are describing what my hair looks like. 

In Italian, on the other hand the adjective USUALLY goes after the noun. Take the same sentence that I used before… let’s translate it in Italian:

Giulia has brown hair = Giulia ha i capelli marroni.

As you can see FIRST I used the noun CAPELLI then after the noun I placed the adjective, in this case the color MARRONI.

Let’s look at some other examples:

• La macchina blu
• Il fiore giallo
• Il ragazzo alto
• I bambini piccoli

The exception: 

There are some adjectives that can be used in both positions so either before or after the noun. When you change position of the adjective you also have a change in the meaning of the sentence.

When the adjective comes after the noun you are talking in literal objective way.

Mario è un mio amico vecchio. Vecchio means old. So here I’m literally saying that Mario is an old person… in age.

If I take the adjective and I place it before the noun the meaning changes and I’m using a more figurative way of speaking. 

Mario è un mio vecchio amico. 

In this case I'm not saying that he is old… but that we have been friend for a very long time!

Let’s look at these sentences together and let’s compare the meanings of the sentences when we change the place to the adjective: