Where can I go in Italy where English is not spoken

Frank - Here are some small towns where you can fully practice your Italian with the locals and make lifetime friends. After 6 weeks, you will probably be very fluent in Italian and experiencing La Dolce Vita.

Northern Italy:

Bergamo, Reggio Emilia, Ferrara

Central Italy:

Volterra, Montefalco, Viterbo, Montepulciano

Southern Italy:

Scilla, Lecce

Sicily has very few English speakers among the older population outside of the obvious tourist spots. I've had a few speak with me and only in Italian/Sicilian. Even in (large) Naples, hardly anyone spoke English that I dealt with. So I would focus on the south (or just practice your Italian with older people). If you've studied 6 years, you should be fine. I studied for 2-3 and it was easy enough.

Abruzzo, which is full of tiny towns and lacking English-speaking tourists. Not L'Aquila, though. Somewhere smaller like Tagliacozzo or Castel del Monte. Also, when we spent a few nights in Pesaro, no one even tried to speak English with me, even in our 5-star beachfront hotel (off-season).

From personal experience, I'd send you down (up?) to Campania & the remote mountain village of Sant' Arsenio, roughly 55 km southeast of Salerno. It was where my great-great grandparents were born, and we visited there on a geneological mission of sorts in March 2015.

I had prepared--or so I thought--by spending a few weeks with the Rosetta Stone Italian module. The first couple hours in Sant' Arsenio, trying to find our way around town and the city hall, I was woefully overmatched. I could barely pick up a word when listening, and fairly tongue-tied when trying to speak. The locals knew a few words in English, but that was it. It was frustrating to say the least.

But...after about 6 hours of wandering and occasionally projecting my fractured pidgin Italian, it suddenly got better. I was picking up more of what they were saying, and I could occasionally respond without seeing a pained expression on their collective faces. Unfortunately, it was time to leave to head back to Salerno, but that gave me hope that had I stayed a couple days or a week, I could've eventually gotten by.

I guess that's what immersion is all about...

One consideration to be aware of. Many of the people in smaller towns speak some dialect of Italian, often unfamiliar to others from outside their villages and towns. They can usually speak "schoolbook" Italian, but among themselves revert to the more informal dialect. Not a game changer, but a consideration. Example from my grandmother's village, the Italian word for "it's raining" is "piove," but the dialect word is "n'gup."

Any small town or rural area outside of the itineraries that are popular with Anglophone tourists would be devoid of English speaking people.
In Tuscany, Florence, Siena and its Province, Montepulciano, Volterra, San Gimignano, Pienza, the Chianti hillls, Cortona, are not good choices. You hear more English than Italian in those places.

Maremma (in the province of Grosseto), Casentino Valley or Alta Tiberina Valley (province of Arezzo), are good choices.

South of Tuscany, any place is good away from Rome, the Amalfi and Sorrento Coast, or Taormina in Sicily.

Calabria villages of San Marco Argentano and Mongrazzano. We found two people who spoke a few words of English when we stayed overnight in San Marco Argentano (because Mongrazzano is too small for a hotel), an 80-something year old priest and a shop owner. In the old familial village of Mongrazzano, only an Italian visitor spoke English. Both are tiny villages so I can't imagine spending 4 to 6 weeks there. My hunch is that the farther south you go in Italy, the less English will be spoken because there are not as many tourists.

Here along the Central California Coast, later today and tomorrow, we are all ready to celebrate “n’gup, n’gup!” Personally though, I hope it is all Chiaro con Sole for Thanksgiving Day.

This was all at Christmastime in 2012, so unless things have changed drastically in just 7 years: Sicily wasn’t exactly full of English speakers. Older or younger, the people we encountered weren’t using English much, including at hotels, restaurants, and most sights.

After our ferry crossing onto the mainland, we drove up to Castrovillari for a stay, in northern Calabria, but still deep in the south. Castrovillari has about 22,000 residents, so not tiny, but with all the services a 4-6 week stay might require. The youngish people (24 to 34 years old?) running the camera store didn’t speak English, and resorted to using Google Translate app on one of their phones, to silly, not-always-accurate results. Still, I got a memory card for my camera. There’s no one nicer in the world than the people we encountered, throughout that town and the region. We haven’t been back since, but plan to visit again soon!

Adding to Cyn's comment, many Sicilians speak Italian clearly because it's learned as a second language to the Sicilian they speak at home.

There are all sorts of places you could go, but you could just do what my husband does and ask the person very politely if he or she could please speak Italian because he needs the practice.

I agree that you can always ask them to speak in Italian. "Possiamo parlare in italiano? Devo fare pratica." But one interesting tidbit told me by my first Italian instructor was that some people in the tourist trade are paid extra if they can speak English, so they might resist speaking in Italian, esp. if their supervisor is around.

As for a good town to stay in, I would also suggest Bergamo. Charming mid-size town/small city in northern Italy with very few English speakers, and least when we were there a few years ago.

(And, no, you won't be "very fluent" after six weeks, but you will likely be more conversant and more comfortable speaking in Italian.)

It's tough to hear it in part because your brain needs to reprogram a new department for it. Listen to Italian as much as you can from any source, even if you can't give it your full attention. Perhaps this podcast can help: https://www.newsinslowitalian.com/
Also I've had luck watching/listening to https://www.raiplay.it/ but from the US you have to use a VPN exiting from an Italian IP address.

www.Raiplay.it does not require a VPN, like Tunnelbear. All you need is to register with an email.
The only programs that you would need a VPN are those programs that RAI has the exclusive rights only for Italy (for example many soccer matches). In that case if you have an American IP address you can’t see it. You’ll need TunnelBear VPN to go around that restriction.

Other major networks available online are La 7, which also has a lot of talk shows and news info (politically left of center):
https://www.la7.it/

Or if you prefer to peruse Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire, you can go to the Mediaset channels (leaning politically to the right of center).
https://www.mediasetplay.mediaset.it/

Obviously if you just watch fiction or variety shows, the editorial leaning doesn’t matter.

Also, you can arrange to skype or facetime while at home with an Italian tutor and/or find one in many towns in Italy.

Did someone already suggest getting Italian language CDs from the library?

Surprisingly enough very few people speak English in this Tuscan coastal town.

Nevertheless it’s not a bad place to vacation in the summer. I have.
Take a look

I will add another vote for Castrovillari, if a quiet city surrounded by a large, mountainous national park sounds like your type of thing. 4-6 weeks is a long time, and the city is a good base from which to take some day trips to explore the region and go hiking. We took some back roads down there from Potenza - that's a wide swath with a few nice, small towns in which your Italian will be exercised. The same goes for the towns and pit stops along the coastal highway that cuts over to Taranto.

Start in any touristy town, drive 40 - 60 minutes in most any direction, and you'll find a place where English is not spoken. If you head north from Lucca in Tuscany you get into some very rural areas where you will have to speak Italian! Smaller villages in the Dolomites, Umbria, and Sicily are places I've had to really work hard to communicate and think ahead to ask for what I want / need in Italian.

I just finished reading oen of Donna Leon's Inspector Brunetti mysteries and it seemed that everyone spoke with a regional accent, and in Venice there seemed to be an accent for every neighborhood.

I have no idea if that's her imagination (she's not from Italy) or if it's a fact, or if younger people speak with those accents. It makes me think of New York's neighborhood accents which seem to be disappearing as kids speak more like tv and movies and less like their parents. Anyway, what I'm getting at is that it can be difficult to understand "standard" language in different accents and there may be many accents in Italy. I have no trouble understanding people from London or Belfast, but I need an interpreter for a Scottish accent.

We live in Verbania, on Lago Maggiore. Even though Stresa is very close, Verbania has very few people that speak much English. Everyone is very friendly and willing to put up with out limited Italian. In 16 months, have yet to come across another American expat living here. In the summer, we rarely see American tourists, unless we are riding the ferry. While we are not fluent, we've have learned how to communicate.

Verbania is a town of about 30,000 people, but feels very small town, especially Pallanza and Suna. Very central for the ferry to go anyplace on the lake, including Switzerland. Prices here are about 2/3 of what one would pay in Stresa for a glass of wine, dining out, coffees, etc. While there are tourists here, it's mostly Italians, Germans, Swiss, and French. Today we had two cappuccinos lake side for 1.50 each. A glass of good Piedmonte wine runs between 2.50-5 euros a glass, depending on the Bar/restaurant and location.

Except for the first two weeks in August, it is not crazy busy here. Water temperature by June is warm enough for swimming.

It's only a quick day trip to Milan (we are going on Thursday), very close to Switzerland (we've done a couple of day trips and three trips from 3-6 nights each. Bologna, Verona, Turin and the Dolomites are a half day train ride, and good for 2-3 nights. The train station is not right in town, but a 15 minute bus ride.

PM me if you'd like more information on Verbania or Lago Maggiore. We've had 7 groups of people visit us and we've yet to run out of things for people to do.

From April through mid October there is a direct bus from Malpensa to Verbania that costs only 15 Euros.

We spent several days in Late Sept in Alvito (Frosinone) and we’re presently surprised that very few people spoke English ( I wanted to practice my limited Italian).

Chani, at least in Italy, there's a difference between speaking a dialect and speaking with an accent. Italy has loads of regional dialects that are functionally different languages, not just a different way of pronouncing the same words. More here, for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Italy

Do you know the difference between a “dialect” and a “language”?

A “language”is a dialect with an Army behind it.

The dialects near La Spezia (and therefore Cinque Terre) change in only a few miles because it's near several historic dividing lines based on geography, past invasions, and regional border lines. Our village on the SE edge of the Gulf of La Spezia has a different dialect from 10 miles away in Monterosso. One of the dividing lines is called the 'La Spezia - Rimini line' and it's origins go way back and is used by linguists to differentiate dialects and languages - as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Spezia%E2%80%93Rimini_Line.

Do you know the difference between a “dialect” and a “language”?

A “language”is a dialect with an Army behind it.

So, mio amico Roberto...

With so many dialects in Italy...who speaks the real King's Italian (like the King's English, certainly not like King's Hawaiian bread)?