I was wondering this while watching a dubbed movie in Italian on Netflix. In your opinion, why do our actors manage to give that special touch to the voices? Is there a particular school for it or is it just experience?
Italian dubbing is really good mainly because we have a long, serious tradition in this field, with studios and professionals who've passed the craft down for decades! It's not like actors are born already good at dubbing, but there's actual formal training - lots of them take specific courses and learn how to sync their voice with lip movements, manage their breathing, modulate to convey emotions without the support of a physical body like in theater. Then obviously there's experience too, because when you work a lot in dubbing you develop a trained ear and an ability to adapt that lets you make any line sound natural, even when the original is poorly done!
I'm not sure if it's just a matter of long tradition, because honestly countries like France and Spain have just as solid a dubbing history but often don't achieve the same feeling. In my opinion what matters more is that in Italy dubbing isn't seen as second-rate stuff - the actors who do it are genuinely talented, not rejects, and there's this strange balance between staying faithful to the text and making the line sound natural, like it was originally written in Italian. Plus maybe it's also that people grow up appreciating dubbing from a young age and so they get attached to a certain quality, whereas elsewhere it's more seen as a temporary thing.
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