Learn Italian
as it's spoken on the street.

Standard Italian, the version most courses teach, is based on Florentine Tuscan. Neither Rome nor Milan actually speaks it casually, and the two cities do not sound alike either.

Rome speaks Romanesco underneath its standard Italian: truncated infinitives (mangiare becomes magnà, andare becomes annà), er replacing il as the definite article, mo' replacing adesso for now, and a fast, ironic delivery that carries two thousand years of civic personality in it. Romans understand and use standard Italian in formal settings, but casual Roman conversation runs almost entirely on this dialect layer, and it is one that most Italian courses never mention.

Milan runs on a different logic entirely. The old Milanese dialect, a distinct Romance language in its own right, has mostly faded from daily speech, but its vocabulary survives in specific words locals still use constantly: pirla (idiot), sciùr and sciura (sir and ma'am), giargiana (someone from the provinces). Layer on a faster, more clipped northern Lombard delivery, a more formal default register that holds onto Lei longer before switching to tu, and heavy English mixing in the fashion and finance industries, and Milanese Italian sounds like a different city's version of the language, because it is.

Rome rewards knowing when to drop a syllable and land an ironic beat. Milan rewards precision, pace, and knowing the handful of dialect words that mark you as someone who has actually spent time there. Pick your city and learn its version first.