This school was absolutely excellent in improving one's ability to speak Italian. This was largely based on my professor, Simone, who was highly talented at second language teaching. This is the school you come to if you really want to learn how to speak Italian. Oral and written communication is stressed less, as it should be, because if you're in Italy you should be taking as much advantage of your opportunity to speak as possible. You can read and write Italian all you want at home.
I was in the advanced group which was made up of C1 and C2-level students. We started each day with prepositions, which is the hardest grammatical concept to pin down, and this helped me greatly. Because the group was so small, we didn't exactly have speaking "activities" but instead spent the entire class time communicating with each other and with the teacher in a natural way, in Italian, so we got plenty of practice. Not much time was spent on reviewing grammar, which was good because at that level everything should have already been learned. We spent a lot of time discussing culture, watching clips from movies, and listening to songs. Simone was particularly gifted in incorporating cinema into the learning experience, and one of the lessons I enjoyed the most was where he would play clips from movies that used a certain dialect and we would have to guess where in Italy it was from.
Overall, in just a short month, my Italian improved leaps and bounds. I was a little concerned that the other students in my group might have been at a lower level than me, and grammatically they were, but orally we were all about the same, so it worked out great. If you want to learn Italian, this is the school and (very importantly) the city to go.
What would you improve about this program?
I would add more in-house tourist-y activities. Some of the students who go to Abbey School already live in Turin either for work or because they married an Italian or whatever the reason, so there is less the sense of a school full of foreigners who are in Turin for the first time and want to explore the city together. However, there are still plenty of foreigners, so it would be nice if the school catered more to those of us who want to do fun things like take tours with the professors or participate in cooking classes, all those extracurricular activities that language schools usually tend to offer.
