While it is common for Gothic novels to introduce some type of frame narrative, the framing of The Italian, which consists of an Englishman reading a book presented to him by "An Italian gentlemen" in a church after the men watch a cloaked figure steal out of a confessional (which reminds the Italian, presumably, of Schedoni) subverts several key conventions. First, Radcliffe neither includes the frame in the body of the story nor creates any rhetorical marker to contextualize its interpretation. In the endnotes to the edition published by Penguin, Robert Miles, a well known Radcliffe scholar, creates a prologue for the frame; the edition announces that "Radcliffe does not employ the term 'prologue'. It has been added by the editor for the sake of conveniant reference" (479). As John Frow posits in "The Literary Frame,"

The authority of the frame is equivalent to that of the genre expectations which it establishes, and the internal structure of the text may either confirm this authority or react dynamically to it, or at the extreme may break it. In all of these cases, structure is only made possible by the presence of the frame. (335)

The frame story in The Italian, because the story itself is not structurally framed in the novel, foreshadows the lack of contextual interpretation which plagues the reader throughout the novel.

The title of the novel most directly applies to the frame story and not the subsequent adventures of Vivaldi, Ellena and Schedoni. The typical Gothic title announces the character--or locale--of interest. "The Italian" references, directly, the Italian who provides the Englishmen with the story. In "Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian," Cannon Schmitt explains that the frame-story and title combine to predicate a novel which "will exhibit and explain alien behavior" (853). That is to say, The Italian is framed as a novel that "should be taken as emblematic of Italianness, Catholicism, a mysterious and un-English way of life" (853). Schmitt goes on to examine the novel's messages in terms of this foreignness.

The Italian's frame, mysteriously, does not close itself at the end the way a reader will expect. It closes metaphorically, as the marriage and celebration take place in garden whose "style ... was that of England, and of the present day, rather than of Italy" (476). We begin and end with familiarity, and while the neither the Englishman nor the mysterious Italian reappear in the novel, the wonted image of the Englishman reading a book thematically returns as an English party.