Typically, these Italian conjunctions are equivalent to the English even if/even though, although and despite:
Nonostante avessi studiato, non riuscivo a ricordare la risposta corretta. Although I had studied, I could not remember the correct answer.
We expect someone who has studied to be able to produce the correct answers when taking an exam. However, as shown in the example above, this did not happen to the speaker, and the conjunction nonostante draws our attention to this outcome.
Below is the set of concessive subordinate conjunctions that we’ll be exploring in this lesson: