The study aims to identify the thematic areas in which the Italian borrowings are used conjuring up the image of Italy, as well as to describe the functioning features of narration, description and argumentation in the travelogue. The subject matter of the article’s analysis comes down to such a linguistic feature of the travelogue as the system of borrowed words and word combinations adding colour to the speech (foreign-language inclusions, barbarisms, exotic words, i.e., borrowings) arranged into functional-semantic types of speech. The research is novel in that it treats the travelogue as a special type of the text in terms of its linguistic organisation, as well as it studies the distribution and functioning of Italicisms in this genre. As a result of analysing the Italicisms used in two books by the modern author A. V. Ippolitov, as well as their distribution, such thematic areas in which the foreign words are used as art, culinary art, city and other, evoking a new image of Italy among the Russian reade