Flag: Italy Emoji

The flag of Italy, known in Italian as il Tricolore. Three equal vertical bands: green at the hoist, white in the middle, red at the fly. Ratio 2:3. Since 2006 the colors have been officially fixed to Pantone Fern Green (17-6153), Bright White (11-0601), and Flame Scarlet (18-1662), corresponding roughly to #008C45#008C45, #F4F5F0#F4F5F0, and #CD212A#CD212A.

🇮🇹 is one of the top-five most-used flag emoji on global social media. It's not just the country marker for 59 million Italians. It travels with an enormous diaspora (over 18 million Italian Americans alone, plus 1.4 million Italo-Argentinos, 1.1 million Italo-Brazilians, and large communities in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK) and with a vast global Italophile fandom built around food, football, fashion, Ferrari, and cinema.

The emoji is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1EE REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER IU+1F1EE REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER I + U+1F1F9 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER TU+1F1F9 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER T. Supported platforms render the tricolor; unsupported ones fall back to the letters ITIT. Added in Emoji 1.0 (2015), part of the original flag-emoji set.

Article 12 of the Italian Constitution of 1948 fixes the flag in one short sentence: 'La bandiera della Repubblica è il tricolore italiano: verde, bianco e rosso, a tre bande verticali di eguali dimensioni.' Flag Day (Festa del Tricolore) is celebrated every January 7, the anniversary of the Cispadane Republic's 1797 adoption of the tricolor in Reggio Emilia, seven years before the birth of a unified Italy.

🇮🇹 sits at the crossroads of three big communities, each posting it for different reasons. The result is an unusually context-rich flag emoji.

Italians posting from Italy. Football weekends (Serie A, the Azzurri), national holidays (especially June 2 Festa della Repubblica and April 25 Liberazione), and political moments. Italians are a bit more flag-shy than, say, Americans or Brazilians, but 🇮🇹 shows up on every Forza Italia post when the national team plays.

The global diaspora. Italian Americans are the fourth-largest ancestry group in the US. Around Columbus Day, the Feast of San Gennaro in NYC's Little Italy (11 days every September), Sunday gravy photos, and Nonna videos, 🇮🇹 is a heritage marker more than a nationality one. Argentinian and Brazilian Italian-descent accounts use 🇦🇷🇮🇹 and 🇧🇷🇮🇹 combos to flag dual identity, especially during football tournaments.

Global Italophile fandom. Food videos (pasta tutorials, Stanley Tucci's Searching for Italy reruns, nonna-style cooking accounts), travel posts (Amalfi Coast, Puglia summers, Milan fashion weeks), Ferrari and F1 content, the opera/ballet niche, and in 2025 an enormous surge from the AI-generated Italian Brainrot meme movement on TikTok (Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala, Bombardino Crocodilo).

The 🤌 pinched-fingers pairing. 🇮🇹🤌 might be the single most iconic two-emoji combo in modern social media. 🤌 was added in Unicode 13.0 in 2020, originally proposed as the 'che vuoi?' gesture, and it went viral immediately with AOC and comedian Jaboukie Young-White tweets. The two emoji travel together in nearly every Italian-flavored post online.

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  Capital: Rome (41.90°N, 12.50°E)
• 👥
  Population: ~58.8 million (2025)
• 🗾
  Area: 301,340 km²
• 💶
  Currency: Euro (EUR, €)
• 🗣️
  Language: Italian (it); regional minorities include German, French, Slovene, Ladin, Sardinian
• 📞
  Calling code: +39
• ⏰
  Time zone: CET (UTC+1), CEST (UTC+2) in summer
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .it

Foods that show up next to 🇮🇹

Landmarks that anchor travel content

The Italian tricolor is older than Italy itself. The three colors first appeared in 1789 on a cockade worn in Genoa, seven years before any green-white-red military flag existed. On August 21, 1789, students at the University of Genoa wore green-white-red cockades in solidarity with the French Revolution but deliberately swapped out French blue for green, the color of spring, renewal, and natural rights in late-Enlightenment political symbolism.

The flag proper was born in war. On October 11, 1796, the Lombard Legion raised a green-white-red banner as its war flag in Milan during Napoleon's Italian campaign. Three months later, on January 7, 1797, the Cispadane Republic, a short-lived Napoleonic sister state covering Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna, and Ferrara, formally adopted the tricolor as its national flag. That's the date Italy still marks as Festa del Tricolore every year.

Kingdom and Republic. The flag bounced in and out of use through the chaotic 19th century, carried by the partisans of the Risorgimento and eventually, on March 17, 1861, raised over the newly proclaimed Kingdom of Italy with the Savoyard coat of arms pinned to the center white stripe. That royal version lasted until the 1946 referendum abolished the monarchy. On June 18, 1946, the plain tricolor without the Savoyard arms became the flag of the new Italian Republic, written into Article 12 of the Constitution adopted on January 1, 1948.

The color fix. The flag had no officially codified Pantone values for most of its life. A 2003 government document specified a darker forest green and a darker red that looked wrong on TV and on printed banners, so in July 2006 the government published a new Official Protocol in the Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 174 redefining the colors as Pantone Fern Green 17-6153, Bright White 11-0601, and Flame Scarlet 18-1662. Those are the values every Italian embassy, sports federation, and airport flag-maker has used since.

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  January 7: Festa del Tricolore: Anniversary of the Cispadane Republic adopting the tricolor in 1797. Italy's flag-specific holiday. Reggio Emilia hosts the main ceremony.
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  April 25: Festa della Liberazione: Liberation Day. Commemorates the 1945 end of Nazi occupation. Bella Ciao everywhere, wreaths at the Altare della Patria, and a reliable political flashpoint.
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  May 1: Festa dei Lavoratori: Labour Day. Concertone del Primo Maggio in Piazza San Giovanni, Rome, watched live by half a million and on RAI 3 by millions more.
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  June 2: Festa della Repubblica: Republic Day. Military parade past the Colosseum, Frecce Tricolori green-white-red smoke trails over the Altare della Patria, peak institutional 🇮🇹 posting day.
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  August 15: Ferragosto: The Assumption of Mary, but culturally Italy's summer shutdown. Beaches fill, cities empty, most businesses close. Peak seaside Instagram content.
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  December 8: Festa dell'Immacolata: Immaculate Conception. Unofficial start of Christmas. Presepe goes up, the national tree is lit at St. Peter's, and the Pope lays flowers at the Spanish Steps column.

• •The green-white-red tricolor cockade predates the Italian flag by seven years, first worn in Genoa on August 21, 1789 by students in solidarity with the French Revolution but with blue swapped for green.
• •Festa del Tricolore on January 7 commemorates the Cispadane Republic's adoption of the flag in 1797, making it one of the oldest continuously recognized national flags in continental Europe.
• •The exact shade of Italian green shifted in 2006: a 2003 decree specified a darker forest green and red that looked wrong on HDTV, so the government republished the Pantone values as Fern Green 17-6153, Bright White 11-0601, and Flame Scarlet 18-1662 in Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 174 on July 28, 2006.
• •About 62% of Argentines have at least one Italian ancestor; São Paulo has more people of Italian descent than Rome; and the US has more Italian speakers than any Italian city outside Rome, Milan, and Naples.
• •The 🤌 pinched-fingers emoji, now near-inseparable from 🇮🇹 on social, was proposed to Unicode by filmmaker Theo Schear and friends in a 14-page proposal in April 2019 and approved in Unicode 13.0 in 2020.
• •Italy has 59 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the most of any country on earth (tied with China). 15 of them are in or near Rome alone.
• •The Frecce Tricolori aerobatic team paints green-white-red smoke trails over the Festa della Repubblica parade every June 2. It's the largest flag-colored formation display on earth, and the photos land on every front page in Italy the next morning.
• •Italy's 2025 Jubilee Year) drew around 32 million pilgrims and tourists to Rome through the year, the biggest tourism year in the country's history.