Italy's language requirement is B2 in four skills, not IELTS 6.0

Ask ten agency websites what Italy requires and nine will answer "IELTS 6.0". It is repeated so consistently that families arrive at our office treating it as a law, budget for a test they may not need, and occasionally give up on Italy because a first attempt came back at 5.5.

There is no such national rule. The document that actually governs the entry, stay and enrolment of international students in Italy is the joint procedure issued by the Ministry of University and Research and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it never names a test. What it names is a level, a set of skills, and who decides.

What the procedure actually says

There are two cases, and almost every misunderstanding comes from mixing them.

A degree taught in Italian. Each institution organises, on its own authority, a test of Italian and sets the level it requires, which must be at least B2 on the Common European Framework. That test is compulsory for first-cycle, second-cycle and single-cycle degrees taught in Italian. A student holding a recognised Italian language certificate at B2 or above, issued by a recognised certifying body, is exempt from sitting it — and those certificates can be obtained in your own country.

A degree taught in another language, which for a Bangladeshi applicant almost always means English. Here there is no Italian test. Instead the competence required in the language of the course is not less than B2, it must always be certified, and it must be entered into the pre-enrolment application. The evidence accepted is a suitable certificate from an internationally recognised institution, or an equivalent certificate issued by the university itself — and, in either case, it has to attest the required level in all four skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing.

That last clause is the one nobody quotes, and it is the one that changes decisions.

Legal floor against what we actually see

Two different things get called "the requirement", and it is worth separating them on one page, because the difference is the whole subject of this article.

The bottom two rows are ours. They are what our dataset carries because it is what we see Italian programmes ask for, and we publish them as observed typicals rather than as requirements. Anybody presenting the 6.0 as Italian law is presenting our kind of number as the ministry's kind of number, which is a small dishonesty with an expensive consequence: it tells a 5.5 candidate that Italy is closed when it may not be, and it tells a 6.5 candidate that the question is settled when the four-skills clause may still bite.

Why "all four skills" is not a technicality

Most well-known English tests report four component scores as a matter of course, so for most applicants this clause passes unnoticed. It stops being invisible in exactly the cases where people reach for a cheaper route.

• A certificate that reports a single overall score with no skill breakdown does not, on its face, attest the level in four skills.
• A medium-of-instruction letter from your Bangladeshi university is not a language certificate at all. It says the degree was delivered in English. Whether an Italian institution accepts it is that institution's decision, taken under its own responsibility, and it is a decision about admission that still has to be converted into something the pre-enrolment file can carry. We set out what a strong one looks like in what a medium-of-instruction certificate looks like.
• A school-leaving certificate in which English was a subject attests a subject grade, not a CEFR level.

The clean route, when your evidence is thin, is the last one the procedure names: an equivalent certificate issued by the university itself. Italian institutions run their own assessments precisely so they can produce that document, which is why an invitation to an online test or an interview is a normal step rather than a sign that something has gone wrong with your file. The practical routes and which universities use which are covered in studying in Italy without IELTS — this page is about the rule underneath them, not a repeat of that one.

Four things about the institutional test that are worth planning around

It happens before the visa application. The procedure asks institutions to hold the test before the visa is requested, and preferably remotely, so the result exists in time to be used.

The result is uploaded by the institution into your pre-enrolment application. The whole point of that step is to spare the consular post from repeating the check. So the language outcome is not a private matter between you and the department; it becomes part of the file that travels.

Failing it stops everything behind it. A candidate who does not pass the language test cannot be admitted to any further competitive or aptitude test the programme runs. The language check is a gate, not one score among several.

It is not portable. An assessment run by one institution discharges that institution's obligation. Another university may still want its own.

The Italian-taught route, and why the exemptions rarely help a Bangladeshi applicant

If you are applying to a degree taught in Italian, the default is that you sit the institution's own Italian test at its stated level, and the only general way out is a recognised Italian certificate at B2 or above from a recognised certifying body, obtainable in your own country.

The procedure does also list categories of student exempted from the Italian test outright, and it is worth knowing what they are so that nobody sells you one. They are built around Italian schooling and Italian-language qualifications: students holding a secondary diploma from an Italian state or state-recognised school abroad, holders of certain listed foreign secondary qualifications, holders of Italian language and culture diplomas from the Italian universities for foreigners, and holders of Italian certificates at the highest levels. A Bangladeshi student coming out of HSC will hold none of them.

That is the honest picture: for an Italian-taught degree, your route is the certificate or the test, and both mean real Italian study starting well before the application. It is the single most underestimated item in an Italian plan, and it is why the Italian-taught catalogue is realistically a second application rather than a first one from Dhaka.

How to read a programme page without guessing

The level is set by each degree programme's own teaching regulations, which is why two master's degrees in the same faculty can differ. So the sentence on the programme page is the authority for you, and there are only four things to extract from it.

1. 1Which language the course is taught in. Everything follows from this and nothing else is decided until it is settled.
2. 2Which level that programme requires. B2 is the floor in the procedure; a programme is free to ask for more, and competitive ones do.
3. 3Which evidence it names, and whether the list is closed. Wording such as "or equivalent, at the discretion of the admissions board" is an invitation to ask.
4. 4When the evidence is due, which is the institution's own date and is normally earlier than anything the consulate publishes.

If any of the four is not stated in writing on the page, that is the email to send, and the reply is the document to keep.

The sentence that resolves "Italy without IELTS"

You will read that Italy does not need IELTS, and you will read that it does. Both are reports of real experiences, and the reason they conflict is now visible: Italy requires a level, in four skills, and leaves the evidence to the institution. One university accepts your transcript. The next runs its own test. A third asks for a certificate and nothing else. None of them is breaking a rule, because the rule was never about the test.

Which means the only reliable answer to "does my programme need IELTS" comes from the programme page and the admissions office, in writing, for the intake you are applying to. Not from a country page, and not from this one.

What to do, in order

1. 1Open the programme's own admission page and copy out its language sentence word for word. Save it as a PDF with today's date on it.
2. 2Identify which of the three routes it is offering you: a certificate, a document evidencing the language of your previous degree, or the institution's own assessment.
3. 3If your evidence is anything other than a four-skill certificate, email the admissions office and ask plainly whether it is accepted for that programme, for that intake, and what they will upload into the pre-enrolment application.
4. 4Book the institution's assessment the moment it is offered. It is scheduled around the department's calendar, not yours.
5. 5Complete pre-enrolment on Universitaly with the same evidence you were told to use, and keep the email that told you to use it.
6. 6If you are considering an Italian-taught degree instead, start from learning Italian before you go and treat B2 as a year of work, not a summer.

Who this page is not for

If you already hold a four-skill English certificate at B2 or above and your programme has confirmed in writing that it is enough, this page has nothing for you. Take the confirmation, keep it in the file, and move on to the parts of an Italian application that genuinely go wrong: the pre-enrolment queue, the qualification documents and the funds.

It is also not for anyone hoping to find a way around the level. There is no route in the procedure that produces a degree place without B2 in the language of instruction, and an institution that offers you one is describing a risk rather than an opportunity. A country-by-country view of where the bars actually sit is in IELTS requirements by country in Europe.

Last verified 14 September 2026 against the ministerial procedure itself. Language rules are reissued with each two-year cycle, so read the current circular before you rely on any of this.