Italian for B1 Cittadinanza

Since December 2018, an application for Italian citizenship by residence or by marriage has to carry proof of Italian at B1 level. Some applicants are exempt — a long-term EU residence permit or a qualification from an Italian school can stand in, and your prefecture is the authority on what it accepts, so check before you pay for anything. Everyone else meets it with one of the dedicated citizenship exams — CILS B1 Cittadinanza from the Università per Stranieri di Siena, CELI 2 i B1 Cittadinanza from Perugia, or the equivalents from Roma Tre and the Società Dante Alighieri.

The thing most study plans get wrong is treating it as ordinary B1. It is not. It is a separate exam with its own published syllabus, and that syllabus is shorter than the B1 you would find in a textbook. Standard CILS B1 runs five sections in about three hours fifty-five, including a four-task grammar paper. B1 Cittadinanza runs four sections in about two hours fifteen, and there is no standalone grammar paper at all — grammar is folded into the reading section as six multiple-choice gaps.

The four sections

• Ascolto — 30 minutes, 2 tasks. Six multiple-choice questions on short everyday dialogues, then twelve true/false items on two longer recordings.
• Comprensione della lettura e riflessione grammaticale — 40 minutes, 2 tasks. Twelve true/false items on a text of 350 to 500 words, then a six-gap cloze.
• Produzione scritta — 40 minutes, 1 task. An email of 80 to 120 words, chosen from two prompts.
• Produzione orale — about 10 minutes. A one-minute personal introduction, then a two to three minute conversation on a topic you pick from a short list.

Each section is worth 12 points and you need at least 7 in every one of them. There is no averaging and no capitalizzazione: fail one section and you sit the whole exam again.

The grammar the syllabus actually names

This is the useful part. Siena publishes the syllabus for B1 Cittadinanza, and its morphosyntax section is a closed list. Here is all of it, with the page in our Italian grammar guide that covers each line:

• Articoli determinativi e indeterminativi — Italian Articles: Overview
• Preposizioni articolate — Preposition + Article Contractions
• Posizione dell'aggettivo qualificativo — Adjective Position
• Comparativo e superlativo — Comparative and Superlative
• Pronomi personali, forme toniche e atone — Tonic pronouns, direct object, indirect object
• Pronomi riflessivi — Reflexive Verbs: Complete Reference
• Pronomi relativi — Relative Pronoun Che, Relative Clauses: Complete Reference
• Possessivi, dimostrativi, interrogativi — Possessives, questo and quello, chi, che cosa, quale
• Indefiniti: ogni, ciascuno, nessuno, qualche — Ogni and Ciascuno, Nessuno, Qualche and Alcuni
• Indicativo presente — Presente: Complete Reference
• Indicativo passato prossimo — Passato Prossimo: Complete Reference
• Indicativo imperfetto — Imperfetto: Complete Reference
• Infinito presente — L'Infinito: Overview
• Imperativo — Imperativo: Complete Reference
• Condizionale presente — Il Condizionale, regular formation, polite requests
• Avverbi di modo, tempo, quantità, luogo — Italian Adverbs: Complete Reference
• La frase semplice: dichiarative, interrogative, esclamative, volitive — Questions: Complete Guide, Exclamations
• Coordinate: copulative, avversative, dichiarative — Coordination
• Subordinate: oggettive implicite, temporali, causali, dichiarative, relative esplicite — Subordinate Clauses: Overview, temporal conjunctions, causal conjunctions

Three indicative tenses, the imperative, the present conditional, the infinitive, and a syntax list that stops at ordinary subordination. That is the entire morphosyntactic requirement. Note also what the verb line says exactly: the active and reflexive conjugations. The passive is left out by the same sentence that lets the rest in.

What the syllabus does not name

None of the following appears anywhere in the B1 Cittadinanza syllabus. In the university's own sample paper — roughly 1,900 words of listening transcripts, reading texts and tasks — the congiuntivo does not occur once, and neither does the passato remoto.

• Il Congiuntivo, in any tense
• Il Passato Remoto
• Condizionale passato
• Periodo ipotetico of the second and third type
• The passive voice, as noted above
• Causative far fare
• Reported speech with backshifting
• Combined clitics — glielo, me lo, te ne

Two honest caveats. Reading and listening texts are built from real-world material, so a construction can turn up even when the syllabus does not ask for it; being able to recognise penso che sia is cheap and worth having, and it is producing these forms that you can postpone. And the futuro semplice is not on the list either, but it is common enough in everyday Italian that leaving it out feels like a false economy.

If you want the rest later — after the exam, on your own schedule — it is laid out in order on the B1 Intermediate path, where the congiuntivo is phase 2 and the passato remoto is phase 4.

The vocabulary is a named list too

The syllabus is unusually specific about words. Reading and listening texts are built from the Nuovo Vocabolario di Base della lingua italiana — De Mauro's roughly 7,000-word core of Italian — plus up to about 5% outside it. For your own writing and speaking, you are expected to use the lessico fondamentale, the innermost 2,000 words that account for most of any ordinary Italian text, together with the everyday alta disponibilità words: the vocabulary of the house, the doctor, the school, the office, the bus.

A fixed list of a few thousand words that has to be automatic under time pressure is exactly what spaced repetition is for.

The route

We checked the syllabus against our own Italian course, line by line, and the answer was clearer than we expected: every structure the syllabus names is taught in A1 and A2 of the main Italian course — lessons 1 to 168. Of its 136 B1 lessons, about five are on the syllabus. The rest is the congiuntivo, the passato remoto, the periodo ipotetico and the causative: real Italian, and not what this exam asks for.

So the route is:

1. A1 and A2 of the main Italian course — about 57 hours, and it covers the syllabus grammar.
2. This course — the bureaucratic register, the everyday domains and a kit for each exam task, plus the five syllabus items stranded up in B1, so you never have to go in there for them.
3. B1, after your exam. Not before. It is about 39 hours of material your exam does not test.

One honest note in the other direction: A1 and A2 cover the structures, but only about half of the lessico fondamentale. Closing that is most of what this course's vocabulary does.

Nothing you learn here is wasted. When you have passed, you can transfer your progress from this course into the main Italian course and carry on at B1 with everything you learned here already counted. Do that after the exam, not before — transferring pauses this course, and you will want it until the day you sit.

What the tasks look like

From Siena's published sample paper, so this is the real register rather than a guess.

The writing task is a problem-solving email. One prompt asks you to write to your landlord: you are having trouble with the neighbours, you have decided to move, explain why and ask whether you still owe the next few months' rent. The other asks you to write to a head teacher as the parents' representative, because the school canteen menu has got worse and the parents want it fixed. Practical, slightly annoyed, entirely everyday.

The speaking test opens with a minute about yourself, from a fixed list of questions: your name, your age, where you are from, where you live and how long you have been there, what you do. Then you choose a conversation topic. The published set was city versus countryside, which parts of Italian culture feel furthest from your own, healthcare in Italy compared with your country, and the documents and procedures for obtaining citizenship.

That last one is worth noticing. The exam is happy to ask you to talk about the process you are sitting the exam for.

What this page does not do

We do not grade your email, we do not simulate the examiner, and our exercises are not in the exam's formats. For format practice, go to the source: Siena publishes the complete B1 Cittadinanza syllabus, a full sample paper with the audio, the answer key and the marking criteria, free, at cils.unistrasi.it. Work through it. Nothing else tells you as precisely where you stand.

We also cannot register you for anything, and we are not affiliated with any certifying body. The Ministry of the Interior publishes which certificates count, and your prefecture decides what it accepts — check both before you book, not after.

What we are good at is the part underneath all of it: a few thousand Italian words and a short list of grammar, held in memory rather than revised once and forgotten. That is what this course is — 40 lessons, every one of them inside the syllabus, and not one form the exam does not ask for.