For ages, I've always wondered why on Italian news sites such as Corriere della Sera and in Italian books, there are always little marks that look like these; '«', '»'. In an act of procrastination, but one that will relate to the research into foreign languages I am doing for university, I looked them up. In Italian these punctuation marks are named caporali, and signify quotation marks. The small arrows are also used in other languages, particularly in French, where they go by the name of guillemets, after Guillaume le Bé who was a printer and punchcutter in the 1500's. '«' and '»' were for a long time the standard and only symbols for quotations, but after desktop publishing became widely common in the 1980's, the use of these punctuation marks reduced as many font sets did not offer the use of them. In Italy, other newspapers such as La Repubblica use doppi apici (","). Both these forms of quotation marks are used for direct discourse, jargon, and foreign language, while singoli apici (',') are used to signify a quotation within a quotation, or words meant to be taken ironically.
The choice to use either the caporali or the doppi apici is a stylistic decision more than anything else, as they mean the same thing; often the typeface will dictate which is available for use. What is more important is that the use of punctuation remains consistent within a body of text.
Another difference in punctuation between Italian and English, is that in the language of the former, commas and full-stops are written outside the quotation marks, both for the caporali and the doppi apici. Where the English would write "I went to the beach.", the Italians would write «Sono andato alla spiaggia». Or "Sono andato alla spiaggia".
