Reading time: 11 min · Published by Phoenix Relocation Group · September 2026
Milan is the Italian city where you can get furthest without Italian. Multinationals run in English, the banks have English interfaces, your colleagues will switch languages the moment you hesitate. For the first few months that feels like a lucky break.
Then the gap starts to show up in places that matter. The condominium meeting where a vote is taken about your building. The paediatrician who speaks no English. The employment contract clause you are reading in translation. The spouse who has been in the city for six months and still has no independent social life. And, for non-EU nationals, a language requirement written into the residency process itself.
Late September and October are when Milan’s language courses fill up, from the free public system to the private schools. This guide covers what is available, what it costs, what the state actually requires, and how long it realistically takes.
The levels that are not optional
For EU citizens, no Italian language requirement exists at any stage of residency. Everything in this section applies to non-EU nationals, and it is worth knowing early because the timelines are long.
The first threshold is A2, required for the permesso di soggiorno UE per soggiornanti di lungo periodo, the long-term residence permit available after five years of legal residence. You demonstrate it either with a recognised certificate at A2 or above, or by sitting the state language test. The test is requested online through the Ministry of the Interior portal and administered by the prefecture of your province, which convenes you within sixty days. It consists of five tasks covering listening, reading and written interaction, scored out of one hundred, with a pass mark of eighty. Fail it and you can re-apply, but only after ninety days. That single detail is why starting a course in your third year of residence rather than your fifth is a sound idea.
The second threshold is B1, required since the 2018 reform for Italian citizenship applications. This one cannot be satisfied by the prefecture test: it requires a certificate from one of four recognised bodies, CILS from the University for Foreigners of Siena, CELI from Perugia, PLIDA from the Società Dante Alighieri, or CERT.IT from Roma Tre. Expect to pay somewhere between fifty and one hundred euros per sitting depending on the body and the level, with results taking around forty-five days. Main exam sessions cluster in January, March, May and October, so booking is done months ahead.
There is also the integration agreement, the so-called permesso a punti, signed by most first-time non-EU permit holders, which commits you to reaching A2 and a basic level of civic knowledge within two years. A CPIA course completed and certified satisfies it.
The free route: the CPIA system
The Centri Provinciali per l’Istruzione degli Adulti are state schools for adult education, and they are the best-kept secret in Milan for newcomers. Courses are free apart from an administrative and insurance contribution of roughly twenty to fifty euros depending on the centre, paid through PagoPA after classes start.
CPIA 5 Milano covers the city itself, running Italian as a second language at eight sites including Via Pontano, Via Heine, Via Colletta, Viale Zara, Via Scrosati, Via Satta and Viale Campania. The surrounding CPIAs cover the hinterland: CPIA 2 for the north-east, CPIA 3 for the south including Rozzano, San Donato and Corsico, CPIA 4 for the Legnano, Rho and Bollate axis.
The structure is standardised. The A1 course runs about one hundred hours, the A2 course about eighty, and the full path to a certified A2 for someone starting from scratch is designed around two hundred hours including an initial assessment and credit recognition. Enrolment begins with an interview and a placement test, after which you are assigned to a level group. Classes run in the morning, the afternoon and the evening, which is what makes the system usable for people who work.
Two honest caveats. Classes are mixed in background and prior schooling, and the pace is set by the group, so a fast learner with a university degree will sometimes feel held back. And places at the most convenient evening slots go quickly in October. If the CPIA route suits you, enrol now rather than in November.
The certificate issued at the end is the one that counts for the long-term permit and for the integration agreement, which is precisely what a private school cannot give you.
The private route: schools, intensity and price
Private language schools in Milan serve a different need: speed, small groups, flexible scheduling and teaching aimed at professional adults.
Passepartout, near the centre, runs a well-established format of sixty hours over four weeks for 405 euros plus a 45 euro enrolment fee, books included, as well as longer academic-semester courses and evening courses designed for people already working in Italy. Scuola Leonardo da Vinci, which has a Milan campus alongside Florence, Rome and Turin, publishes annual rate cards for standard, intensive and super-intensive formats, with small-group ceilings. ELLCI, close to Corso Buenos Aires, is a CELI and CIC examination centre for the University for Foreigners of Perugia and runs standard courses of twenty lessons a week, intensive formats and dedicated evening classes.
A useful benchmark: intensive daytime courses of twenty lessons a week are built for students and for people between assignments, and cost several hundred euros a week. Evening or twice-weekly term courses are the realistic option for someone in full-time work, and land closer to the price of the Passepartout format above. One-to-one tuition is the most expensive per hour by a wide margin and is worth its cost only for targeted goals: a presentation to deliver, an exam to pass, a specific professional vocabulary.
The Società Dante Alighieri in Milan sits between the two worlds, offering courses and the PLIDA certification in the same place, which simplifies matters if citizenship is on your horizon.
How long it really takes
The two-hundred-hour figure used by the CPIA system for A2 is a reasonable planning number, and it maps onto something recognisable: after roughly two hundred hours of structured study plus daily exposure, you handle shops, tradespeople, your building and small talk. It is the level at which Milan stops being an administrative obstacle course.
B1, the citizenship level, is a different order of magnitude, typically two to three times that investment, because it requires handling unfamiliar topics and sustained conversation rather than transactional exchanges.
What derails most professionals is not the difficulty of Italian, which is a forgiving language for English, French or Spanish speakers. It is the plateau that follows the first three months: once you can order, greet and apologise, the daily incentive to improve disappears, because everyone around you speaks English. Breaking through that plateau needs a structural change rather than motivation, and the ones that work are unglamorous. Two fixed evenings a week in a class with a register and a teacher who notices absences. One recurring activity conducted entirely in Italian, whether a sport, a choir, a volunteering commitment or a parents’ association. And a rule negotiated with your team that a specific meeting stays in Italian.
The spouse question, which is really the retention question
In our experience supporting international families, the accompanying partner’s language progress is the single best predictor of whether an assignment goes the distance. The employee has a ready-made structure: a workplace, colleagues, a schedule, a professional identity. The partner has none of it, and until the language arrives, neither a professional network nor a social one is reachable.
This is also the most common gap in corporate relocation packages. Where language training is provided at all, it is usually allocated to the employee, who needs it least. If your package includes a training budget and your partner is not working, redirecting part of it is the highest-return decision available, and most employers agree when it is put to them in those terms.
The practical route for a partner is usually a mix: a morning CPIA or private course for structure, plus something in Italian that would happen anyway, because childcare, schools and sport produce daily conversation with people who are not being paid to be patient.
Before you enrol: a short checklist
- Decide the target: survival Italian, the A2 certificate, or B1 for citizenship, because the three imply very different commitments
- Non-EU residents: count backwards from your five-year permit date and start the A2 path at least a year ahead
- Book a CPIA placement interview now if an autumn start matters to you
- Ask your employer whether language training is in the package, and whether it can be transferred to your partner
- Check whether your preferred school is also an exam centre, which spares you a separate registration later
- Book the certification session several months ahead, with sessions concentrated in January, March, May and October
- Pick one weekly non-work activity that runs entirely in Italian, and treat it as part of the course
How Phoenix Relocation Group fits in
Language is where administrative integration and family integration meet, which is why it sits inside our Settling-In work rather than beside it. We help international professionals and their families in Milan, Rome and Naples identify the right route for their situation and their timeline, from the free public system to private schools and certification bodies, and we make the enrolment calls and the placement appointments in Italian so the first contact is not itself a language test.
We work in English, French and Italian, and we handle the paperwork sequence around it: residency registration, health enrolment, schools for the children, and the permit milestones where the A2 requirement eventually appears.
→ Settling in and unsure where language fits into your first year? Get in touch for a free assessment of your situation.
📧 info@phrg.it | 🌐 www.phoenixrelocationgroup.com
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