Thank you very much, the thing worked perfectly well, the only difference
from what you wrote was that i changed the ispell-local-dictionary-alist,
because the ispell-dictionary-alist looked a  little strange to me (it is
something like "(append ... ... ...)" but i don't know where those variables
are stored). Your
sample entry for the italian dictionary was very very useful!

Thank you again! --- Maurizio Coccioli

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> wrote in message
m38yvv22a8.fsf@defun.localdomain...
> "Maurizio" <mauco@libero.it> writes:
>
> > When I issue the command M-x ispell-change-dictionary i can't find the
> > italian dictionary in the list of dictionaries,
>
> There's no dictionary called "italiano"?  It _is_ there in Emacs 21 (but
> it might be missing in Emacs 20).
>
> > Should i change the value of the ispell-dictionary-alist variable?
>
> Yes.
>
> > How can i do it?
>
> Do `M-x customize-option RET ispell-dictionary-alist'.  Add a new
> entry -- this is the setting used for Italian in Emacs 21:
>
> Dictionary: Value Menu Dictionary name: italiano
>             Case characters: [A-ZÀÁÈÉÌÍÒÓÙÚa-zàáèéìíóùú]
>             Non case characters: [^A-ZÀÁÈÉÌÍÒÓÙÚa-zàáèéìíóùú]
>             Other characters: [-]
>             Many other characters: Toggle  off (nil)
>             Ispell command line args:
>             INS DEL Arg: -B
>             INS DEL Arg: -d
>             INS DEL Arg: italian
>             INS
>             Extended character mode: Value Menu ~tex
>             Character set: Value Menu iso-8859-1
>
> Finally hit the "Save for future sessions" button.