Italian · Italiano

Flagship 18 verified age-safe resources .

About Italian

Language family
Indo-European, Italic, Romance
Where it's spoken
Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City
Speakers
roughly 65 million native speakers

Italian evolved from the Tuscan dialect of Vulgar Latin and was popularized as a literary standard by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the 13th and 14th centuries, long before political unification in 1861 made it a national language. Of the major Romance languages, it retains vocabulary and sounds closest to Latin. Its cognate overlap with Spanish, French, and Portuguese makes it a natural second Romance language to add.

Resource Type Levels Cost Verified
FSI Italian course
Public-domain FSI Italian courseware — hub anchor.
course free A1-B1 free 2026-07-22
Live Lingua Italian library
Public-domain course downloads with audio where available.
course free A1-B1 free 2026-07-22
DLI GLOSS Italian
Search GLOSS for authentic reading/listening lessons.
course free B1-C1 free 2026-07-22
Coffee Break Italian
Friendly audio course podcast.
course free A1-B1 freemium 2026-07-22