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Italian Cities Word Search

A word search dedicated to Italian cities, perfect for a geography lesson with a cultural twist. Hidden in the grid are eight words to find: Rome, Milan, Naples, Turin, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Palermo. Each city carries a treasure worth discovering. Print it for free or download it as a PDF: ideal for a lesson on Italy or a fun activity before a trip.

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Created for free at creapuzzle.com

Italian Cities, one by one

Italy is a country of cities with thousands of years of history, and the eight in this grid are some of its best known. Below is a short note on each one, handy for planning an imaginary trip once the grid is solved.

Rome — Italy's capital, home to the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and the Trevi Fountain; it also contains Vatican City, the smallest state in the world.

Milan — The capital of fashion and business, famous for its striking white marble cathedral.

Naples — Overlooking its bay at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, the birthplace of pizza.

Turin — Italy's first capital, elegant and orderly, known for cars and chocolate.

Florence — The cradle of the Renaissance, an open-air museum with its cathedral, Ponte Vecchio and world-famous art.

Bologna — Home to Europe's oldest university, celebrated for its porticoes and its food.

Venice — Unique in the world: built on water, with no cars, where people travel by boat along the canals.

Palermo — The capital of Sicily, a crossroads of peoples and cultures, full of colourful markets and bold flavours.

Old names and city records

Many Italian city names come from far away. Rome, according to tradition, was founded on 21 April 753 BC and has been the capital of Italy since 1871. Milan was called Mediolanum by the Romans, a name that may mean “in the middle of the plain”; Naples comes from the Greek Neapolis, “new city”; Florence from Florentia, a name that echoes the Latin for “flourishing”, and its symbol is the lily; Palermo from Panormos, “all harbour”, the name the Greeks gave to a Phoenician settlement; and Venice from the Veneti, the ancient people of the coast.

Each city also has a record to its name. Turin was Italy's first capital, from 1861 to 1865, and its Egyptian Museum is the oldest in the world devoted entirely to ancient Egypt. Bologna has a university founded in 1088, considered the oldest in the Western world still in operation, and its porticoes, about sixty kilometres of them, became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021. Venice is built on 118 small islands, has more than four hundred bridges, and for over a thousand years, until 1797, it was an independent republic.

Milan's cathedral was begun in 1386 and took almost six centuries to finish completely, and a golden statue, the Madonnina, stands on its tallest spire. Mount Vesuvius, which towers over the Bay of Naples, last erupted in 1944, and the historic centre of Naples has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995.

Four activities along the boot

Cities are easier to remember when each is tied to a place, a flavour and a picture. Here are a few ideas for the classroom or for home:

  • A map of Italy. On a blank map, children put a marker on each of the eight cities and join them with a line from north to south, from Turin to Palermo; then they count how many regions the line crosses.
  • One landmark each. Match every name with a picture to draw or to find: the Colosseum for Rome, the cathedral for Milan, Vesuvius for Naples, the Mole Antonelliana for Turin, Ponte Vecchio for Florence, the Two Towers for Bologna, the Grand Canal for Venice and the Teatro Massimo for Palermo.
  • Travel times. With a train timetable or a travel website, children find out how long it takes to go from Rome to each of the other seven cities, then put the cities in order from the nearest to the farthest.
  • A culinary postcard. For each city, write one typical dish on a postcard, found with an adult's help: risotto alla milanese for Milan, tortellini for Bologna, pizza for Naples and arancine for Palermo.

How this grid is built

Eight cities hide in 12×12 squares: two horizontal, one vertical and five diagonal. FLORENCE, with eight letters, is the longest word and ROME, with four letters, the shortest. PALERMO runs along the top row and TURIN along the bottom one, so the grid turns the map of Italy upside down, with the far south above the north-west. Four of the five diagonals, ROME, MILAN, FLORENCE and BOLOGNA, slope down to the left, and only NAPLES slopes down to the right. FLORENCE and BOLOGNA run side by side, just as the two cities lie only about a hundred kilometres apart. No word crosses another, and every row and every column holds at least one word.

More Italian places

To add more places, open the generator with the City theme, which holds street, square, bridge, park, shop, hospital, church, station, market and museum, and type in more Italian cities: Genoa, Verona, Bari, Trieste, Perugia. The generator ignores spaces and accents, so a two-word name such as Reggio Calabria is placed as a single word.

Also in Italian

The Italian names are Roma (Rome), Milano (Milan), Napoli (Naples), Torino (Turin), Firenze (Florence), Bologna (Bologna), Venezia (Venice) and Palermo (Palermo), so six of the eight are spelled differently in Italian. The Italian version of this puzzle, Crucipuzzle delle Città Italiane, has no horizontal words at all: four run vertically and four diagonally.

More word searches to try

From the cities you can move on to territories, travel and tastes:

For more educational games to print, from geography to vocabulary, read the article Educational printable games.