The following Italian tutorial was written by a soon to be graduate student in linguistics named Jennifer Wagner, who runs a fantastic website called Indo-European Languages - ielanguages.com. We thank her for generously allowing us to post her work here!
30. Italian Irregularities in Regular Verbs
Verbs ending in -care and -gare add an h before the -i and -iamo endings to keep the hard sound. Verbs ending in -ciare and -giare do not repeat the i in front of the -i ending.