  Large Language Models represent state-of-the-art linguistic models designed
to equip computers with the ability to comprehend natural language. With its
exceptional capacity to capture complex contextual relationships, the LLaMA
(Large Language Model Meta AI) family represents a novel advancement in the
field of natural language processing by releasing foundational models designed
to improve the natural language understanding abilities of the transformer
architecture thanks to their large amount of trainable parameters (7, 13, and
70 billion parameters). In many natural language understanding tasks, these
models obtain the same performances as private company models such as OpenAI
Chat-GPT with the advantage to make publicly available weights and code for
research and commercial uses. In this work, we investigate the possibility of
Language Adaptation for LLaMA models, explicitly focusing on addressing the
challenge of Italian Language coverage. Adopting an open science approach, we
explore various tuning approaches to ensure a high-quality text generated in
Italian suitable for common tasks in this underrepresented language in the
original models' datasets. We aim to release effective text generation models
with strong linguistic properties for many tasks that seem challenging using
multilingual or general-purpose LLMs. By leveraging an open science philosophy,
this study contributes to Language Adaptation strategies for the Italian
language by introducing the novel LLaMAntino family of Italian LLMs.
