Learn Italian before you move to Italy, not after.

What actually happens in your first six months

People imagine the hard part of moving to Italy is the visa. It is not. The hard part is the eighteen small interactions that follow, all of which happen in Italian, most of which happen at a counter, and none of which care that you are tired: the codice fiscale, the residency registration at the anagrafe, opening a bank account, the utilities, registering with the health service and choosing a doctor, the lease, the condominium meeting, the internet installation that was supposed to be Tuesday.

Every one of those is survivable through a translator or an English-speaking agency, and every one of them costs you money and independence when handled that way. Italian is the difference between managing your own life and having it managed for you.

Two vocabularies, and you need both

• The bureaucratic register. Formal, fixed, and genuinely learnable because it repeats. The phrases that appear on every form, the polite constructions that make an official helpful rather than obstructive, the words for documents you have never needed in English.
• The everyday register. The neighbour on the stairs, the greengrocer, the parents at the school gate, the man at the bar who will become the person who tells you what is really going on in the town. This is the one that decides whether you build a life here or a bubble.

Courses tend to teach the second and skip the first. We teach both, in the order your move requires, and we practise the counter conversations as role-plays until they stop being frightening.

Where you are going changes what you need

Milan and a village in Abruzzo are different countries in this respect. In the cities and the well-known expat regions you can get a long way on English and will have to make a deliberate effort to practise. In a small town in the south, English mostly is not an option, and you will hear dialect alongside Italian from day one. Tell us where you are moving and the lessons adjust: register, vocabulary, and the accent your ear needs to get used to.

Timing, honestly

Six months before the move, at two lessons a week, gets most people to a level where the first weeks are manageable and the counters do not defeat them. A year gets you to the point of building friendships rather than transactions. If your move is sooner than that, we prioritise ruthlessly: the bureaucratic set first, the social Italian once you have landed and have a reason to use it every day.

And if the move involves an Italian passport, the language requirement is a separate matter with its own exam. That is covered on our Italian for citizenship page.