Italian is the language people mean when they say a language was easy for them.
Spelling is almost perfectly phonetic, so reading and saying are the same skill. Stress is regular enough to guess most of the time. There are no cases, no noun declensions, and very little that has no English parallel. A motivated adult can be reading simple Italian within weeks.
That is not the whole story, and the parts that are hard are hard in specific, identifiable places.
Where the work actually is
Verbs. Italian verb endings are numerous, and the verbs you need first are precisely the ones that misbehave. That is not bad luck: a verb used a hundred times a day gets learned whole by every child and never gets tidied into the regular pattern. Frequency protects irregularity, in Italian as in English.
The two auxiliaries. Essere and avere do an enormous amount of structural work, and choosing the wrong one is the error that marks a learner fastest. There is no way around learning both conjugations by heart, early.
The subjunctive. English has flattened almost all of its own, so learners assume Italian has too. It has not. Italian uses the subjunctive in ordinary conversation, after ordinary expressions of opinion, and you meet it sooner than you would like.
What this course is
A hundred words, one chapter, and three grammar guides: the articles, essere and avere, and the three verb families. Enough to read simple Italian sentences and decide whether to go further, and honest about stopping there.