The paper defines the courses and conceptual terms that lead to language borrowing and provides a historical overview of important changes and research results within the linguistic discipline that we nowadays call contact linguistics. The very process of language borrowing is explained, alongside with features of loanwords adjustment at different language levels. Since the Russian language is the recipient language in this paperwork, a classification of loanwords in Russian is presented with examples of loanwords from various languages that arrived in the Russian language. Language contacts represent the starting point of the language borrowing process, demonstrated in this paperwork on the examples of Italian-Russian language contacts throughout history and today, that have influenced the popularity and spread of the Italian language in Russia. The purpose of this thesis is to study the presence of Italian language in Russian gastronomy from a linguistic point of view, to give examples of popular Italian loanwords in the field of gastronomy and to recognize adaptational changes of Italian loanwords in the Russian language system.