Your first week in Italy: a student's checklist

Landing day: get connected, then get oriented

Buy a local SIM card as soon as you land — at the airport, or at any phone shop in town — because you'll want working data almost immediately, for maps, for transport apps, for reaching your landlord or your university's international office. Italy's main operators (TIM, Vodafone, WindTre, Iliad) all sell prepaid plans aimed at exactly this situation, and a passport is normally the only document you need. Spend your first day or two getting oriented rather than rushing straight into paperwork: find the nearest pharmacy and supermarket, work out the bus or metro routes you'll actually use, and locate your university's international or welcome office in person.

The sequence that everything else follows

Almost every task in your first weeks depends on an earlier one, so it helps to see the whole sequence at once before you start on any single item:

Each of these has its own dedicated guide with the actual step-by-step process — this page is about getting the order right, not repeating the detail.

Get your codice fiscale early — almost everything else needs it

Your codice fiscale is Italy's personal tax identification number, and it's one of those quietly essential documents that shows up as a requirement for tasks that otherwise have nothing to do with tax: opening a bank account, signing a lease, registering with the national health service, even getting a SIM contract in your own name later on. Get it sorted in your first few days so it isn't the thing blocking three other tasks in week two. Our guide to getting a codice fiscale in Italy covers where to apply and what to bring.

The 8-day clock: permesso di soggiorno

This is the one deadline on this page that isn't flexible. If you're a non-EU student staying longer than 90 days, you're required to start your application for a permesso di soggiorno (residence permit) within 8 working days of arriving in Italy. That's working days, not calendar days, and the clock starts the day you land — not the day you feel settled enough to deal with it. Missing this window can create real problems for your legal status, so treat it as the task that anchors everything else you schedule in week one. The process itself — the post office kit, the documents, the Questura appointment that follows — is covered in full in our guide to the permesso di soggiorno for students.

Settling into housing

If you arrived with housing already arranged, this part is mostly about confirming details — collecting keys, checking the contract matches what you agreed, understanding how utilities and Wi-Fi work in your building. If you're still searching, it becomes a first-week priority in its own right, because you can't register residenza without a confirmed address. Our guide to finding student housing in Italy walks through the main routes — university residences, private rentals, and shared flats — and what to check in a contract before you sign.

Registering residenza at the comune

Once your address is settled, the next step is registering your residenza at the local comune (municipal office) — this is what formally establishes your legal residence at that address, and it feeds into other administrative processes down the line. It isn't something you can do on day one, since it depends on having a confirmed home address first, but it shouldn't sit forgotten for months either. See our guide to registering residenza at the comune for the documents involved and what happens after you submit them.

It's a lot at once — and that's normal

Reading all of this back to back, it can look like an overwhelming pile of admin dropped on you in your very first days in a new country, on top of jet lag, a new city, and the actual reason you came here: your course. It is a lot. The part that trips people up isn't usually any single task — it's not knowing which of these genuinely has to happen this week and which can reasonably wait until week three or four without causing problems later. Getting that sequencing wrong is exactly how people miss the 8-day permesso window while they're busy sorting out a bank account that could have waited. If you'd rather have someone walk you through the order in person rather than juggling five separate guides in your first week, that's what our arrival & settling-in service is there for.