langsandlit:

Italian has various workarounds if you wish to avoid using an undesired pronoun. In instances where the pronoun is a non-subject (i.e. direct or indirect object), we could use:

• (una, questa, quella…) persona “(a, this, that…) person”, “someone”;
• Qualcuno “someone”;
• Name of the person in question (easiest choice).

1a. Ho incontrato una persona molto gentile per strada. Mi ha chiesto di andare a prenderci un caffè = I meet someone in the street and they were very nice. They asked me to go take a coffee together (non gender specific).

1b. Ho incontrato un/una ragazzo/ragazza molto gentile per strada. Mi ha chiesto [..] = I met a boy/girl in street and he/she was really nice. He/she asked [..] (gender-specific)

2a. Ho finalmente incontrato qualcuno che mi ha reso felice = I’ve finally met someone that has made me happy (non gender-specific)

2b. Ho finalmente incontrato un/una uomo/donna che mi ha reso felice = I’ve finally met a man/woman that made me happy (gender-specific)

3a. Ho inviato un libro a Lucia/Fabrizio = I sent Lucia/Fabrizio a book (non gender-specific)

3b. Le/gli ho inviato un libro = I sent her/him a book (gender-specific)

In cases where the pronoun would act as the subject of a sentence, it would be more natural to drop or omit the subject altogether and leave the conjugated verb (1a). Alternatively, we could use verbs conjugated in the 3rd person plural to talk, generically, about people of unspecified gender, even if the subject is singular.

pongodoodle:

We are currently without a neutral form of pronouns and stuff like that. We do use the * at the end of a word (ragazzo/ragazza/ragazz*) but it’s not something “useful” when you’re actually talking. Long story short, we’re still working on it.

In italian, the neutral is expressed by the “inclusive masculine” which is actually sexist if you think about it. Like, a group of people is addressed with a “male” noun, even if in the group there’s a majority of females. Siblings are called “fratelli”(brothers) even if there’s only one brother and four sisters. Just to make an example. 

We have different “alternatives”, like the pronoun “essi” which is basically the english “they”, but italian is an inflectional language so if you use “essi”, which is plural, you only create a whole bunch of confusion with verb conjugations. 

But language can change and evolve, so maybe in the future we will have a neutral form for non-binary people. If our country changes as well, but I’m not that optimistic since the last elections. 

– Mi hanno detto (lit. “they told me”) domani che la scuola è chiusa.
– Chi te l’ha detto?
– Un insegnante prima che finisse la lezione.

– They told me school is closed tomorrow.
– Who told you?
– A teacher before the class ended [told me].

Other strategies are more context-specific and would consist in using either gender-neutral or apparently masculine nouns and adjectives, e.g. l’insegnante instead of il professore or la professoressa “teacher”; collega “colleague” (gender non-specific) or colleghi “colleagues” instead of gender-specific feminine plural colleghe “[female] colleagues”.

Evident disadvantages are represented by adjetives and past participles of intransitive verbs (verbs that have essere as the auxiliary). These will have to agree in number and grammatical gender with the nouns or names they’re modifying, e.g. è stanco “he’s tired”, è stanca “she’s tired” (cf. siamo stanchi “we’re tired” both all-inclusive and gender-specific).

(Side note: When talking about large groups, masculine plural morphology is more likely to be used as all-inclusive than gender-specific, which means that masculine plural nouns referring to people are more likely to lose their gender-specificity in favour of inclusiveness. On the other hand, feminine morphology is never all-inclusive and always gender-specific.)