We have just started trying to do this with Spanish.

According to what I read, it's very hard to get kids to speak the home language rather than the language of the country, once they are at daycare or school, because their friends are speaking (in this case) English and they think it's uncool to speak the other language at all (in your case Italian, in my case Spanish). So it's important to try to make sure that they are immersed in the other language as much as possible when at home.

Things we plan to do:

- speak only Spanish at home and to each other, even when others are present. In particular, my DH who is the spaniard, will only speak Spanish to DD.

- make sure that all of DD's media, when she is old enough to watch TV and DVDs is in Spanish. She'll miss out on "Playschool", but she'll see the Spanish equivalent on DVD.

- make sure we have friends speaking Spanish around as much as possible

- do our best to spend time in Spain, long enough that she can go to school there for a while, to totally immerse her in Spanish.

All of this is hard to do. In particular, my Spanish is crummy, so it's really hard to get up to speed enough with it to do this for DD. But it's very important, so I'm trying.

I have a cute story about some friends of us who are also an Aussie/Spanish couple with kids. They recently spent 6 months in Spain. Their daughter who was 5 at the time understood Spanish perfectly but refused to speak it at home. While she was at school in Spain she started speaking Spanish, just switched one day, but didn't realise that she'd done it. So when she spoke in Spanish to her Aussie grandparents she didn't understand why they didn't understand what she was saying. She went back to school and told the teacher "my grandparents are crazy! When I talk to them they can't understand me!".

How cute is that

On their return home, this family are now all speaking Spanish at home, and the little girl has figured out her Spanish and her English and now gets the right language at the right time. Aren't human brains amazing!