The chakavian dialects preserve traces of long and complex history of Croatian and Italian contacts in the Dalmatian region. The Split dialect, basis for Miljenko Smoje's articles, contains a lot of Italianisms. Love towards Split, his city, is what inspired Smoje to write in this particular dialect. The dialect of Split was a crucial element of his identity, the symbol of his liberty. The aim of this work is to analiyse the role of Italianisms in the dialectal articles written by Miljenko Smoje. The Italianisms were collected from 52 articles – 26 of them dating from 1970-s, and 26 dating from 1990-s. The corpus consists of 1068 words that originate from the Italian language. Their analysis is based on the classification proposed by Laura Pinnavaia, published in her book “The Italian Borrowings in the Oxford English Dictionary” (2001). The Italianisms are analysed according to their role within the text and divided into 3 categories: loanwords with ideational function, loanwords with interpersonal function and loanwords with textual function. Having analysed the corpus, it's been noted that the majority of the loanwords in Miljenko Smoje's dialectal texts has a textual function, while the minority of the loanwords has an interpersonal function.