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Italian Regions Word Search

A word search dedicated to the regions of Italy, perfect for a deeper geography lesson. Hidden in the grid are eight words to find: Lombardy, Lazio, Sicily, Tuscany, Puglia, Veneto, Liguria and Marche. Each region has its own landscapes, traditions and flavours. Print it for free or download it as a PDF: ideal for revising geography before a test.

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Created for free at creapuzzle.com

Italian Regions, one by one

Italy is divided into twenty regions, each with its own landscapes, dialects and traditions, and the eight in this grid are among the best known. Below is a short note on each one, useful for talking about the map of Italy once the grid is solved.

Lombardy — The most populous region, with Milan as its capital, home to beautiful lakes such as Lake Como.

Lazio — Home to Rome, combining the sea, the countryside and the capital city.

Sicily — The largest island in the Mediterranean, home to Mount Etna, Europe's tallest active volcano.

Tuscany — Famous for its rolling hills, cypress trees, historic towns and art, with Florence as its capital.

Puglia — The "heel" of Italy's boot, with long coastlines, olive groves and its distinctive trulli houses.

Veneto — Home to Venice, this region also includes the Dolomite mountains and splendid art cities.

Liguria — Narrow and facing the sea, famous for the Cinque Terre villages and for pesto sauce.

Marche — Between mountains and the Adriatic Sea, a green and tidy region often called "Italy in one region" for its variety.

Twenty regions and the peoples who named them

Italy has twenty regions, and five of them, Sicily, Sardinia, Aosta Valley, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, have a special statute that gives them extra autonomy. Regions are written into the Constitution of 1948, but the first regional councils were elected only in 1970. Their names often recall the ancient peoples who lived there. Lombardy takes its name from the Lombards, who arrived in AD 568; Tuscany from the Etruscans, whom the Romans called Tusci; Liguria from the Ligurians; Veneto from the Veneti; Lazio from Latium, the land of the Latins; Sicily from the Sicels; and Puglia from the Latin Apulia, a name English still uses as an alternative.

Marche has the most unusual name: it is the only Italian region whose name is plural, because it began as the “marches” of Ancona, Camerino and Fermo, that is, border territories, the same word that gave English the title “marquis”. Raphael was born in Urbino and the poet Giacomo Leopardi in Recanati, both in this region. Lombardy is the most populous region, with about ten million inhabitants, roughly one Italian in six, while Liguria is a thin crescent of land squeezed between the mountains and the sea.

Several regions have places that UNESCO has declared World Heritage Sites: the trulli of Alberobello in Puglia since 1996, the Cinque Terre in Liguria since 1997, the Dolomites, shared by Veneto and its neighbours, since 2009, and Mount Etna in Sicily since 2013. Lazio is home to Rome, and Tuscany to the language of Dante: modern Italian grew largely out of the Florentine of the fourteenth century.

Four activities for exploring the regions

Regions are easier to remember when children build a map and link each one to a place and a flavour:

  • A three-colour map. On a blank map of Italy, children colour the northern regions (Lombardy, Veneto, Liguria) in one colour, the central ones (Tuscany, Lazio, Marche) in a second, and the south and the islands (Puglia and Sicily) in a third.
  • Region and capital. Match each region to its main city: Lombardy with Milan, Lazio with Rome, Sicily with Palermo, Tuscany with Florence, Puglia with Bari, Veneto with Venice, Liguria with Genoa and Marche with Ancona.
  • Sea, mountains or plain? Sort the eight regions by their dominant landscape: Liguria lies between mountains and sea, Veneto has a plain and the Dolomites, Sicily is an island with a volcano. There is no single right answer, which is exactly what gets children talking.
  • The regional treat. Pair each region with one typical food, to be found in a book or on a child-friendly website: pesto for Liguria, orecchiette for Puglia, cannoli for Sicily and panettone for Lombardy.

How this grid is built

Eight regions hide in 12×12 squares: two horizontal, four vertical and two diagonal. LOMBARDY, with eight letters, is the longest word and LAZIO, with five letters, the shortest. This grid has three crossings: LOMBARDY and LIGURIA start from the same L, SICILY crosses LIGURIA on an I, and VENETO crosses MARCHE on an E. VENETO and LIGURIA are the two diagonals, and both slope down to the left. The last row and columns 1 and 10 are empty.

The other twelve regions

The grid covers eight regions out of twenty. To study the other twelve, open the generator and type in Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Emilia-Romagna, Umbria, Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria and Sardinia: the generator removes spaces and hyphens and turns each name into a single word. For the longest names, such as Friuli-Venezia Giulia, choose the 16×16 grid.

Also in Italian

The Italian names are Lombardia (Lombardy), Lazio (Lazio), Sicilia (Sicily), Toscana (Tuscany), Puglia (Puglia), Veneto (Veneto), Liguria (Liguria) and Marche (Marche), so only three of the eight change spelling. The Italian version of this puzzle, Crucipuzzle delle Regioni d'Italia, has seven vertical words and a single horizontal one, with no diagonals and no crossings.

More word searches to try

After the regions you can move on to the produce of the land and to other journeys:

To build your own word search with the other twelve regions, step by step, read the article How to create a word search puzzle.