October is when language courses start. Schools publish their fall schedules, the local adult education center opens registration, and the conversation groups that went quiet in August start meeting again. It is the easiest month of the year to begin.
Most people who move to Italy arrive with good intentions and an app on their phone. A year later they can order coffee and read a menu, and still freeze when the pharmacist asks a question. This article covers the options, what each one is good for and how to get past the part that stops most adults, which is speaking.
Sei pronto?
What Do I Need Italian For?
The goal sets the method and required level.
Italian for daily life, Italian for work and Italian for a formal requirement are three different projects. Someone who wants to talk to neighbors and handle the anagrafe counter needs speaking and listening above all. Someone whose work is in Italian needs reading and writing too. And some people need a specific certified level, which changes the plan entirely.
Two requirements come up most often in our practice. The permesso di soggiorno UE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo, the EU long-term residence permit, requires Italian at level A2 of the Common European Framework, under the Interior Ministry decree of 4 June 2010. Italian citizenship by naturalization, whether through residence under article 9 or through marriage under article 5 of Law 91/1992, requires level B1, a requirement introduced by Decree-Law 113/2018 as converted by Law 132/2018 and applying to applications filed from 4 December 2018.
Citizenship by descent (iure sanguinis) has no language requirement. Note that the 2025 reform, Law 74/2025, created a separate route worth knowing about: a person whose parent or grandparent is or was an Italian citizen by birth can apply for citizenship by residence after two years of legal residence in Italy rather than the usual ten. That is a naturalization route, so the B1 requirement and the other conditions on income and criminal record apply. Anyone considering it should start Italian early rather than in the final months.
| Level | What You Can Do With It | Where It Is Required |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Introduce yourself, ask simple questions, understand slow speech | No formal requirement |
| A2 | Handle everyday exchanges: shops, appointments, short conversations | EU long-term residence permit |
| B1 | Follow a normal conversation, describe experiences, explain an opinion | Citizenship by residence or by marriage |
| B2 and above | Work, study and argue a point comfortably | Often required for university admission and professional registration |
If you are not sure which level applies to your situation, our team can review your case and tell you what you will need and when.
Why Not Just Use an App?
An app builds vocabulary and daily habits. It will not teach you to hold a conversation.
Duolingo, Babbel and Busuu all work for the first few hundred words and the basic structures. Fifteen minutes on the bus is time you would not otherwise spend studying, and the streak is a useful trick for staying consistent. Anki and similar flashcard apps are better still for vocabulary you actually meet, because you build the deck from words you heard that week rather than from a preset list.
What an app cannot do is put you in a conversation where someone is waiting for your answer. Adults who study only on a phone tend to develop passive comprehension well ahead of speaking, and the gap becomes uncomfortable. Treat the app as the daily habit and put your real effort somewhere with people in it.
Options: Language Schools, Private Teachers and Free Local Courses
Italy has a dense network of Italian courses for foreigners, from intensive private schools to free municipal classes.
Florence and other university cities have long-established schools for teaching Italian to foreigners, with intensive courses of twenty hours a week and part-time evening options for people who work. The ASILS association lists accredited schools across Italy, which is a reasonable place to start if you want some assurance about quality. Costs vary widely, so ask what group size the price assumes and whether there is a placement test.
The route many newcomers do not know about is the CPIA, the Centro Provinciale per l’Istruzione degli Adulti. These are state adult education centers, present in every province, that run Italian courses for foreigners at levels from pre-A1 up to B1. Courses are free or nearly free, usually a small administrative contribution, and they typically run from October to May with weekly classes. In Florence, CPIA 1 Firenze has sites in Novoli and in the center. Registration usually opens in September, and classes do fill.
Beyond the CPIA, associations, parishes and the case del popolo run free or very cheap classes in most towns. The Comune di Firenze publishes a list of local providers through its youth portal, and Regione Toscana funds free Italian courses for non-EU residents. These classes are mixed, in age and in nationality, and that mixture is part of what makes them work: nobody in the room is embarrassed about their Italian.
A private teacher, one or two hours a week, is the fastest route if you can afford it, and it suits people who need to target something specific, whether a certification exam or the vocabulary of their own profession. Many adults combine a group course for structure with occasional private hours for the parts that are not working.
But What’s This Italian I Hear on the Street?
A regular conversation partner will make you speak without preparing.
A tandem exchange pairs you with an Italian who wants to practice your language. An hour split in half, once a week, in a bar or a park. Universities, cultural associations and libraries organize them, and Florence has several groups that meet regularly. Apps like Tandem and HelloTalk do the same thing remotely, which is useful if your schedule does not allow a fixed appointment.
Then there is the Italian that no course covers. Regional accents, Tuscan vowels, the local habit (la gorgia toscana) of swallowing the hard c so that la Coca-Cola con la cannuccia corta corta becomes something quite different. Your neighbors will use words your teacher never mentioned. Ask. People are usually pleased to be asked, and the explanation comes with a story.
Some practical ways to get more hours of Italian into a normal week: watch Italian television with Italian subtitles rather than English ones, listen to the radio while cooking, read a local newspaper for ten minutes a day, join something that has nothing to do with language, a choir, a hiking group, a cooking class, a volunteer association. Shared activity carries a conversation better than the conversation itself does.
The adults who make the fastest progress are rarely the ones with the best grammar. They are the ones who accept sounding clumsy for a few months and keep talking anyway.
Do You Need a Language Certificate?
Four certifying bodies are recognized for Italian residence and citizenship purposes. A school certificate cannot substitute.
For the citizenship B1 requirement, the certificate must come from one of the four bodies recognized by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, all part of the CLIQ association: the Università per Stranieri di Siena, which issues the CILS; the Università per Stranieri di Perugia, which issues the CELI; the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, which issues CERT.IT; and the Società Dante Alighieri, which issues PLIDA. All four follow the same European framework, so a B1 from any of them is a B1. What differs is the exam format, the number of sessions per year and how many exam centers are near you.
A certificate is not the only way to prove your level. An Italian school diploma from a state or state-recognized institution also satisfies the requirement, as does, for the long-term residence permit, an A2 recognized through the accordo di integrazione. The CLIQ association publishes the annual exam calendar for all four certifications, with registration deadlines that close well before the exam date, often around 45 days ahead for CILS.
Book the exam earlier than feels necessary. Sessions are limited, deadlines are strict, and a citizenship application cannot be filed without the certificate in hand. We have seen applications wait months because someone missed a registration window by a week.
If you have a citizenship or residence application coming and want to check the language requirement and timing against your own file, write to us.
Email Us About the Language Requirement
How To Get More Confident Speaking Italian?
Most language learners are held back by embarrassment rather than ability.
Adults learning a language carry something children do not, which is a clear sense of how they sound. You know your Italian is worse than your English, and you know the person opposite can hear it. That awareness is what makes people switch to English at the first difficulty.
A few things help. Keep your first conversations short and repetitive: the bar, the bakery, the newsstand, where the script is predictable and you get a small win every day. Learn the phrases that keep a conversation going rather than ending it: come si dice?, può ripetere, per favore?, non ho capito, più lentamente. Tell people you are learning, because most Italians will slow down and help rather than switch languages. And when someone answers you in English, thank them and carry on in Italian.
Progress is uneven and it rarely feels like progress from the inside. Then one day you take a phone call from the plumber without rehearsing first, and you notice afterward.
Know someone putting off their first Italian class? Share this article with them. The first step is often the hardest.
This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Contact us for advice specific to your situation.
