@dougmerritt
Well I lost my hair since then, so the posters aren't accurate anymore and they'll never find me 😄
I learned Italian for 2,5 years before going there... and it wasn't enough 😄 At first I had a lot of trouble understanding the people there, also because of the local dialect. After a couple of months it got better and by the end (six months almost) I wasn't perfectly fluent, but I could have a conversation without too much trouble. I told my colleagues at work to never speak English to me because I wanted to learn the language, which was difficult but it helped a lot.