Patente Decoded

Moved to Italy? Your licence has a 12-month clock. Pass the Italian driving test even as a basic speaker.

After 12 months, licenses from US, Canada, and most countries outside the EU are no longer valid in Italy. The theory test is not offered in English. I’m an American, my Italian is A2, and I passed with zero mistakes on my first try. This app was my whole system.

Buy the 6-month passI already have an account

Pass, or your money back. Reach 95% readiness, then take the test. If you don’t pass, you’ll get a full refund.

€24 for 6 months. One payment, no automatic renewal.

Pass, or your money back. Reach 95% readiness, then take the test. If you don’t pass, you’ll get a full refund.

Scheda d’esamePatente B
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Errori0
My result, first attempt.

The hard part isn’t knowing the concepts. It’s the bureaucratic Italian language.

You already know how to drive. The test is 30 true/false statements in bureaucratic Italian, you can miss only 3, and often one small word — solo, sempre, preannuncia — decides whether a statement is true or false.

You don’t need fluent Italian. You need the Italian the exam uses.

There are over 7,400 questions. Studying every one of them isn’t possible in any reasonable amount of time, and learning the rules feels endless, with exceptions to every one of them.

There’s no shortcut. But there are ways to make your study time count: find your trouble areas fast, and set aside what is already easy for you.

Study for the exam, not the manual

The manual and most quiz apps

  • Follow the government’s chapters, which are disorganised.
  • Include material you will never be asked.
  • Leave out things that are literally in questions on the test.
  • Never say which questions come up often and which are rarely worth your time.

Patente Decoded

  • Puts the highest-value areas first: what appears most on real exam sheets.
  • Shows how the test is structured, and the key elements behind each topic.
  • Learns your problem areas — the content, and the trick questions and wording traps that catch you — and quizzes you on them again.
  • Includes the essential Italian vocabulary, for anyone whose first language isn’t Italian.
  • Comes with the hacks and tricks I used.

See inside the app

Every mock exam looks and works like the real one

Same layout, same 30 True/False questions, same 20-minute timer. On exam day nothing on the screen is new to you.

A practice exam in the app, laid out like the ministerial terminal

Every day, a plan made for you

The app reads your answers and lists the best things to do today: which mistakes to fix, which new concepts to meet, when to sit a mock exam.

Today’s plan: a checklist of study tasks with times

Organised by concept, not by chapter

Signs, junctions, rules of the road: questions are grouped the way the exam tests them, with your progress on every concept. Study for the exam, not the manual.

A study area in the app with its concepts and the learner’s progress

Learn the Italian the exam uses, not the whole language

The exam is in Italian, and one misread word can flip True into False. You don’t need fluent Italian. You need the words the questions are built from. I’m A2 myself, so this part of the app is built for people like me.

  • Tap any word in a question to see what it means and save it to your list.
  • A daily deck of 20 cards: words from your own mistakes first, then the most common exam words.
  • 200 “decider” words marked: the small words that decide whether a statement is True or False.
5,101
different words in the 7,492 questions
125
words make up half of all the text
418
words in the app’s list, covering 70% of it
A real exam statement. One word decides the answer:

In una zona a traffico limitato possono circolare solo i veicoli autorizzati

“solo” = only

The numbers behind the exam

I matched all 7,492 official questions against 657 practice exam sheets, to see what the exam really asks. You won’t find this in the manual or the usual quiz apps.

7,492
official questions
657
exam sheets analysed
335
questions that never appeared on any of them

Half the exam comes from 200 concepts

The bank has 716 concepts, but they don’t come up equally. Rank them by how often they land on real sheets: the top 200 fill half of every exam, and 425 fill 80%. The app starts with those.

0%25%50%75%100%1200425716200 concepts: 50% of the exam200 concepts50% of the exam425 concepts: 80% of the exam425 concepts80% of the exam534 concepts: 90% of the exam534 concepts90% of the examConcepts, most frequent first
Share of exam questions covered

Not every chapter is worth the same

Every chapter gets one or two questions on each sheet, however big it is. So a question from a small chapter is far more likely to be on your exam: one from the best-value chapter turns up almost 6 times as often as one about information signs.

How often each question appears, per 1,000 exam sheets

Best value

  • Chapter name shown in the app9.7
  • Chapter name shown in the app7.7
  • Chapter name shown in the app7.6
  • Belts and helmets137 questions7.3
  • Alcohol, drugs, first aid141 questions7.1
  • Liability and insurance151 questions6.7

The full ranking of all 25 chapters and 716 concepts is in the app.

Least value

  • Lane position413 questions2.4
  • Supplementary panels417 questions2.4
  • Road definitions538 questions1.9
  • Information signs593 questions1.7

Some words give the answer away

Across the whole bank, True and False are split 50/50. Certain words tip the balance. The app teaches you to spot them, and when they mislead.

Word in the statementFalse
  • “esclusivamente”14 statements93%
  • “in ogni caso”24 statements88%
  • “solo”257 statements74%

There are more, plus the words that point to True. They’re all in the app, with when each one misleads.

My own mock exams in the app

In my last four weeks I answered 7,751 questions and sat 31 full mock sheets. You pass with 3 errors or fewer. My last two before the real exam were perfect, and so was the exam.

012345Pass line: 3 errors#1: 0#2: 2#3: 2#4: 2#5: 2#6: 1#7: 1#8: 4 (failed)#9: 0#10: 2#11: 1#12: 0#13: 0#14: 4 (failed)#15: 2#16: 4 (failed)#17: 2#18: 1#19: 1#20: 2#21: 1#22: 1#23: 0#24: 1#25: 0#26: 1#27: 2#28: 0#29: 1#30: 0#31: 0Errors on each mock sheet, in order

It tells you when you are ready

The app tracks your improvement and builds each day’s practice around what will help you most. It measures how ready you are from three things:

My dashboard in the app
90%Mock exams passed28 of 31, and the last 15 in a row.
Mastery
99.7%
Questions I know: never missed, or missed and then right 3 times in a row.
Accuracy
91.6%
Every answer I ever gave, right or wrong.
Recall
97.0%
Past mistakes I won back when they came round again.

Pass, or your money back

Use the program until the app scores you at 95% or higher. If you then take the test and don’t pass, you’ll get a full refund.

You won’t do it alone

I run live sessions to answer everyone’s questions, and you can connect with others facing the same challenge.

Ready to pass and enjoy driving in Italy?

Buy the 6-month pass

€24 for 6 months. One payment, no automatic renewal.

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