Do Italians speak Latin?

I used to take Latin classes in Latin late at night and read, say, Augustine or Cicero if I couldn’t get to sleep. When I fell asleep thinking in Latin, I woke up thinking in Latin and needed a cup of tea before I could form coherent sentences in Italian. On one occasion, having no tea at home, I attempted to purchase tea from a nearby bar. Being tired and muddled, I accidentally tried to order in Latin, to the great annoyance of the woman serving me. Speaking Latin in public to uncomphrehending Italians is embarassing in the same way that speaking your bad high school French is - they assume you are speaking, say, Romanian and that you are too stupid to know the difference between various Romance languages.

Italian is not Latin, despite the overlap in vocabulary. Italians are far more likely to understand if they studied Latin in school but, as in most countries, they probably focused mostly on translating, reading, or some combination of the above. Speaking is a separate skill that needs to be taught, so you can’t reasonably expect someone to be able to respond instantly in perfect Latin if they only ever learned to read or translate. Even auditory comprehension may not be something someone learned in school.

The pronunciation is another issue. Italians are much more likely to understand if you use the pronunciation they use, which is also that often uses by Catholic priests elsewhere. There are multiple ways of pronouncing Latin used by various regions; I taught myself to understand all of them because not everyone I studied under used the same pronunciation, but this certainly isn’t something everyone does or needs to do. Most Americans, for example, learn the reconstructed classical pronunciation described in the book Vox Latina and may not encounter other ways of pronouncing Latin. If an American abroad did manage to stumble upon a Latin speaker in Italy it is perfectly possible that neither would be able to understand the other simply because of the pronunciation.

There is also the issue of accents - I have made a strong effort to reduce my accent in Latin because my vowels were originally quite difficult for others understand. Thicker accents or previously unknown accents can be especially perplexing. My Latin is still obviously that of a native English speaker, but less agressively so.

Of course, some Italians do speak Latin and very well indeed. It is perfectly possible to find Italians that speak Latin, say, among the teachers of the Vivarium Novum or Schola Latina. There are a handful of Circuli Latini, including Rome’s Ambulationes Romanae. However, as in Poland, Lithuania, or any other country in which one may meet a Latin speaker, you have to actually seek them out specifically. You cannot just walk up to random Italians in a cafe and order coffee in Latin, sadly.