The exam day arrived in June, in a gray classroom in Florence. The room held twenty candidates: a Filipino nurse, a Romanian construction worker, a Chinese restaurant owner, a young American wife. None of them looked confident.
Elena shrugged at first. She ordered coffee without mistakes, argued with the plumber about the boiler, and helped Marco with his first-grade homework. But the CILS B1 was different: it tested not just survival Italian, but the ability to write a formal letter, understand an advertisement, and retell a news story in your own words. certification cils b1 for citizenship
She laughed. Then she got to work.