Major honours
Italy has the wealthiest domestic league in the world and is the second-winningest program at the World Championship. The golden generation of the 1990s, built by coach Julio Velasco around Lorenzo Bernardi, Andrea Giovi and Andrea Zorzi, swept World Championships in 1990, 1994 and 1998 and stacked up multiple World League titles, but Olympic gold eluded them completely. The men's Olympic record reads three silvers (1996, 2004, 2016) and three bronzes (1984, 2000, 2012): six trips to the podium and never a gold. Instead, Italy won back-to-back World Championships in 2022 and 2025 to reach five men's titles overall, while the women's team beat Turkey in five sets in Bangkok in 2025 to add a second World Championship to the one won in 2002. Then, at Paris in 2024, the Italian women's team won the country's first-ever Olympic volleyball gold medal, coached by Velasco, the same man who had settled for silver at Atlanta 28 years earlier.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
The Netherlands, who beat Italy 17-15 in the fifth set of the 1996 Atlanta final, and Brazil, who denied Italy its last real Olympic chance in the 2004 Athens final, are the two results that define the narrative of Italian men's volleyball.