The evaluation of any functional disease affecting quality of life requires a purpose-designed quality-of-life index for clinical trials as well as for evaluating the outcomes of treatments. The fecal incontinence quality of life index (FIQL) was developed at Minnesota University (USA) for patients with faecal incontinence but could not be used for Italian patients without appropriate cultural and linguistic adaptation. Therefore this index was translated into italian and prospectively validated on a new series of 73 incontinent patients and 8 healthy controls in order to provide Italian coloproctologists with a useful tool for clinical research. The italian version or the FIQL index met all the statistical criteria of reliability, reproducibility, specificity and convergency required and therefore can be used with confidence in clinical trials on such patients.