Which non-Spanish Romance language is closer to Italian overall -- Portuguese, Romanian or French?

[Jana]

Romanian. I speak Italian but can't understand any of French while I can (suprisingly) Romanian and Spanish. Portugese sounds completely different.

[Seya]

Aooo Seya, mo parli napoletano??? Tieni u guagliò a Napoli??

nun teng ))))

[Seya]

Not at all, lol!
I speak with the Dobrogean "accent", let's say. Actually, some of my Romanian bros from different parts of the country stated that I, like the rest of the Dobrogeni, don't speak with a strong accent compared to the Moldavian or Ardelean one, for example.
If you've ever met someone from Constanța, you will probably get what I mean.

then it's really weird

[Seya]

You lived in Italy? Hmmm.. Its not a country where they leave people, esp. like you, on their own. asdasdjfghjgjf

what is that supposed to mean?

[Böri]

what is that supposed to mean?

nothing gırl, just teasing friendly
Btw İ think Italian sounds closer to Romanian actually than Portuguese or French too.

[SardiniaAtlantis]

what is that supposed to mean?

Means an attractive girl like you was the cause of a lot of attention everywhere you go in Italy much like in TheApricity. Senza dubbio ha ragione!

[Sikeliot]

Romanian. I speak Italian but can't understand any of French while I can (suprisingly) Romanian and Spanish. Portugese sounds completely different.

Romanian sounds like Slavicized Italian. Some also say Sicilian dialects sound Romanian.

[Brás Garcia de Mascarenhas]

This thread and the poll results are hilarious. I am amazed how people have so poor knowledge about Romance language but I am even more amazed about the ignorance of some Romance speakers. The poll excludes Spanish because it assumes that it is the most similar language to Italian and being Portuguese 80% mutually understandable with Spanish how is it in the last place of similarity with Italian then? It makes no sense. Portuguese is also way more similar to Spanish than Spanish is to Italian, stop drawing conclusions based on how similar the accent sounds like.

[kkk77]

I still don't understand how can Spanish be mistaken so much with Italian...

I saw a lot of videos on YT with Italians being mistaken for Spanish people when talking. I personally have friends that (due to Erasmus) they said to be mistaken for Spaniards while in Spain.

For the same reason I can't tell Slavic languages apart.

I couldn't even tell Galician and Castilian apart until I got more exposed to Castilian. Even Catalan sounded weird Spanish to me.

Also:

[Sikeliot]

This thread and the poll results are hilarious. I am amazed how people have so poor knowledge about Romance language but I am even more amazed about the ignorance of some Romance speakers. The poll excludes Spanish because it assumes that it is the most similar language to Italian and being Portuguese 80% mutually understandable with Spanish how is it in the last place of similarity with Italian then? It makes no sense. Portuguese is also way more similar to Spanish than Spanish is to Italian, stop drawing conclusions based on how similar the accent sounds like.

Spanish is 85% lexically similar with Italian. Portuguese is in the 70%s compared to Italian even if 80% similar to Spanish.