How Similar Are Spanish and Italian?

[Smitty]

Italians, how intelligible are the different Italian dialects to you?

[Ouistreham]

And Italian has more in Common with French (89%) than with spanish (82%)

89%?
This is questionable...
This data originates from http://ethnologue.com/ and is reproduced everywhere including Wikipedia.
But it is very doubtful.
Ethnologue also says that French has more lexical similarity with German (29%) than with English (27%).
Which is extremely debatable to say the least.
Very, very unreliable information if you ask me.

[Mens-Sarda]

Apparently catalan is between spanish and italian in terms of distance:

this map looks quite strange, Sardinian in this map appears closely connected with Italian, but actually it's not even in the same Italic Romance sub-group, but it has its own Insular Romance sub-group that is in the middle between Italic and Iberic languages, this makes Sardinian more similar to Spanish than to Italian

[Sebastianus Rex]

A portuguese speaker can't understand an italian or a spanish talking. Its very easy to understand spanish when its written, but talking? I can't get anything, really.

My answer is that depends alot on the level of education and natural hability of the person. Most Portuguese (even uneducated ones) can understand and read basic Spanish (Castillian).

People with medium to high education usually can understand quite well Spanish and even some Italian since alot of words are similar. I've never learned any of them and i can speak, read and write quite well Spanish and mid level Italian.

But i've noticed that in Brazil alot of people have extreme difficulty in understaning other related languages i believe that is because they're much less exposed to foreign languages than Portuguese people and some accents and expression are already drifting away too much from the Latin root.

[Incal]

It must be a Brazilian phenomenon though, because here in Portugal the average person can understand spoken European Spanish easily.

Not really, any brazilian coming here can understand anything we say.

[BlackCleo]

as italian i think french is more similiar to italian rather than spanish.
and as italian I must say that spanish is a very unproper and ugly variant of italian.