The missionaires in the Italian rural areas almost never explicitly address the subject of language communication. However, the sources rebuild the de facto awareness of the problem and the identified and fixed solutions: missionaries shall take into account the linguistic conditions of their recipients and the need to ensure that communication is of significant quality in order to make it possible to mobilise the capacities of the participants and to ensure that they take ownership, in the short term of the mission, of the Christian practices of sactures and devotion, in order to exercise them in everyday life. At that time, the country was linguistically fragmented and speakers had a wide range of dialects. The internal mission is, on the other hand, a travelling experience and, as such, requires that relations be established between speakers of different linguistical-dialectal extraction (missionaires and individual communities). There is no superregional language in Italy, although the unification process was initiated in 1525 in the literary environment (the date is symbolic and corresponds to the opening of the ‘language question’, with the publication in Venice of the prose della volgar lingua de Pietro Bembo). The issue remains controversial, always associated with the intellectual debate and the link with the literary language; the objective of a unitary language is hampered for centuries by cultural and social reasons. In the middle of the nineteenth century, during the political unification of the country, the percentage of ‘Italianophones’ was still considered to fluctuate between 2,5 and 10 %. In the post-tridentin age, outside the literary environment (to which Jesuit missionaries also belong), the number of people able to read, understand and reproduce, both in writing and orally, the language called ‘Italian vulgary’ was not specified; the number of persons positing themselves at the border between orality and writing is also not specified; on the other hand, it is clear that rural peasants are completely illiterate. The linguistic perspective proposed by the Colloquium makes it possible to raise some questions, which concern general questions of the missionary experience of active afternoons between the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 18th century, in the Italian rural areas. When missionaries speak of ‘understanding’ on the part of the poor in the countryside, what are they talking about? A linguistic problem? Do they deal with it by referring to the ecclesiastic-rural criterion that the poor and ignorant (the rudes of Loyola) cannot have access to rational speech? What are and how are the moments of mission-related activity in which language understanding should be crucial and, moreover, communication takes place between different registers (Christian doctrine: didactic; individual faith and colloquia: argumentation and sacramentel; preaching: sacred and persuasive Speech Ombudsman; edges, processors, etc.: interview uncover, order, memory)? Which language in turn speak missionaires (who do not know the local dialects and, in any case, do not know all of them)? And what does they tell us about their self-explanatory texts of their spoken language? Is their preaching style – ‘visible’, ‘dramatic’, with a figurative background and based on orality (they do not lend any written and heart-learned texts) – the answer to the essential problem of language comprehension on the part of campaign loyalists? Is this style a ‘lingua franca’, a ‘general’ language, which wants to be understood by all faithful people beyond local differences, everywhere in the country where the missionaries operate? What is the relationship between physical and verbal actions in the activities that the missionaries carry out for the community as a whole (processors, edges, prayers, requests and answers, etc.)? Did the missionaries indirectly promote practices related to language learning processes, at least through codified uses of the language of the Church (prières, songs, Christian doctrine, etc.)? How should the communication choices of missionaires be framed in their personal perfection and, in particular, in the spiritual and behavioural practice of self-reflection? How does the role of faiths who know read and those who do not know it, that is to say almost all participants, is linked to the missions? Can it be assumed that the system developed by most Jesuit missionaries between the 18th and 18th century improves the level of language proficiency of the participants in the mission? And, if so, can we imagine that missions will also enable loyalists to improve their quality of life and religious participation? I will try to look quickly at the questions raised so far, focusing in particular on preaching and referring to direct sources (relations and letters of the missionaries – it should be known that the Italian Jesuite does not write their preaches after they have pronounced them) and indirect (ignatian didactic documents, general rules for preachers, sacred eloquence), from which I will propose certain significant cases.