[bfred_it]

Most Italian words pretty much match their IPA representation, minus the pretty regular exceptions like Q, C, G, Z and H and the rare irregularity.

It may be difficult to an anglophone, but I'd argue that the phonetic irregularities of English are much more of a problem to a learner. "though/tough/through" never happens in Italian.

[puzzle]

The biggest problem with reading Italian is knowing where the accent goes if it's not mandatory to write, in which case you need to know from context, as in the words at the end of http://www.italianlanguageguide.com/pronunciation/stress-acc...

[scotu]

agreed, the accent location (stressed syllabe) comes down to knowing the word, but only a few cases of wrong accent give you a different word... in english you can change the word by mispronouncing the lenght of the first vowel in words like sheet, beach... both long vowel, different way to write it... although I'm sure I'm being imprecise on "long vowel" (don't know anything about phonetics), but I can't think of an example of non-accent based, italian equivalent