The paper presents an overview of language contact between Italian and Russian. The first part deals with lexical borrowing from Italian into Russian by introducing the main semantic fields that these loanwords belong to. In the second part of the paper focus is placed on lexical items borrowed from Russian into Italian; loanwords documented in Italian are divided into two groups: first, the words (or phrases) that were borrowed in the pre-Revolutionary period (Russicisms), and secondly, the words (or phrases) that were borrowed after the October Revolution (Sovietisms).
