It's very uncommon for Italian words to end in consonants, but vast number of Latin words do. Why?

Question

The vast, vast majority of native Italian words (i.e. words not imported from another language) end in vowels. It's very uncommon for Italian words to stop at a consonant. Yet, when we look at Latin vocabulary, huge number of words end in hard consonants, e.g. diem, emptor, nauseam, rigor, nos, id, meus, and so on and so forth.
We all know Italian is derived from Latin and is closest to Latin among all the romance languages, but what happened to the consonant endings? How did the same population who a few centuries ago used to speak Latin with all its consonant-endings manage to lose not one or two but all of them in the derived language? It's as if such sounds never existed in this population, like the sound ZI doesn't naturally occur in Japanese, or the sound æ (as in English man or stand) doesn't naturally occur in German.
It's stranger in this case because Latin after all originated in Italy, not in a foreign country. It's intimately associated with Italy's history and culture. So what happened?

MaHaZaeL · Answer

How did the same population who a few centuries ago used to speak
Latin with all its consonant-endings manage to lose not one or two but
all of them in the derived language?

I think there is a misunderstanding here. I bolded the word 'speak' in your sentence, just to highlight a point: we must separate the written Latin and the spoken Latin.
Italian comes from the ‘vulgar’ Latin (where vulgar in this case doesn’t mean rude, but just spoken by the populace) and not from the written Latin that you can see in famous books that we study at school.
We are sure about this because there are many many words that we use in common Italian nowadays that comes from the ‘popular’ from and not from the ‘elite’ form. A couple of examples:

Cavallo (horse) comes from caballus (the horse used in the fields) and not from equus (a more elegant horse, war horse for example).
Mangiare (to eat) comes from manducare (rimpinzarsi -> in English should be something like over-feed / gorge on) and not from edere (a polite eating).

So in the end difference is just “graphic” because in spoken Latin they were used not to pronounce the last consonant, expecially m, n, t.
“Animam” was spoken “anima”, “lumen” was “lume”. Also the famous and simple “et” ("and" in English) was pronounced “e” just like today.
Probably you have always heard that Italian written is very similar to spoken and that's true. But this is not true for Latin too! ;)

It's very uncommon for Italian words to end in consonants, but vast number of Latin words do. Why?

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