Does Italian allow "—" for parenthetical use?

Question

In English you can use a number of different styles to add parenthetical remarks. For example:

• Juventus, as you may know, has won the most Scudetti.
• Some would say it's 29 (and technically they're right).
• Others however claim it's 31 — although they're usually die-hard Juventus supporters.

Is the dash style of parenthetical remarks also allowed by Italian grammar? I know I've casually used it from time to time and no one seemed confused by it, but that doesn't make it right.

Answer 1

Traditional Italian usage admits the n-dash in couples only. To rewrite one of your examples: «Juventus – as you may know – has won the most Scudetti». The single dash to introduce a clause at the end of a sentence is quite recently borrowed from English, but doesn't belong to usual Italian punctuation.

To quote from Bice Mortara Garavelli, Prontuario di punteggiatura, Laterza 2003:

Come marca iniziale di una parentetica inserita alla fine di una frase si può trovare una lineetta priva della lineetta terminale correlativa. Tradizionalmente, per un inserto che si trovi in tale posizione, si preferiscono alle lineette le parentesi (una in apertura e una in chiusura seguita dal punto finale), oppure la virgola iniziale [...].

Answer 2

I used to attend a school for translators, and all the translators who gave us lessons used to tell us that the m-dash is actually allowed by Italian grammar but no more in use, so we SHOULD NOT use it while translating from English or German; instead, we could turn it into brackets, commas or other punctuation, as the case requires.