Much confusion is caused to English speakers by the way in which Italians express centuries from 1000 a.d. to 2000 a.d., so let’s try to clear it up:

When Italians say novecento, they do not mean the year 900 a.d., they actually mean the nineteen hundreds, or twentieth century.

So the seicento is the seventeenth century, and so on.

The easy way to work it out is to add eleven to the number before “cento”:

Ottocento – 8 plus eleven = 19 – the nineteenth century.

But if Italians say “secolo” , the meaning follows the English language pattern, so the ventesimo secolo is the twentieth century.