In my experience the section that decides the exam is the first one. The audio plays twice, at natural speed, and it does not wait for you. Candidates who read comfortably at B1 sit in that room and watch the recording run away from them, because reading and listening are different skills and only one of them can be done slowly. The good news is that listening responds to training faster than people expect, if the training is the right kind.
Why listening fails candidates
Three reasons come up again and again. First, exposure without work: candidates play podcasts in the background for months and call it practice, but comprehension grows from attended listening, not from ambient Italian. Second, speed panic: at natural pace, spoken Italian merges words together, and a learner trained only on slow teacher speech hears a wall instead of a sentence. Third, the transcript habit in the wrong direction: reading while listening from the start teaches your eyes to rescue your ears, which is precisely the rescue the exam removes.
The method: repeated listening, transcript last
Here is the routine I give my students, ten minutes a day, and daily matters more than long: frequency is what rewires the ear, for the reasons covered in the case for daily practice.
Take one short audio at your level, a minute or less. Listen once for the gist without stopping. Listen again for details, noting what you caught. Listen a third time trying to fill the holes. Only now open the transcript and find out what those merged sounds actually were; this is the moment the ear learns, because you attach sound to words you were just fighting with. Close the transcript and listen once more: the same audio is suddenly transparent, and that transparency is the skill accumulating. Tomorrow, a new audio. The material must sit at your level, which is the comprehensible input principle from the i+1 article; exam panic is trained away with material you can almost hold, not with the evening news.
Training for the exam specifically
General listening builds the skill; the exam also needs the format. Exam listening tasks make you read questions first, hold them in memory, and catch answers on a schedule you do not control. That choreography must be rehearsed with complete, timed listening sections, which is exactly how the 35 mock tests in the 
amo Italian app treat it: full B1 listening papers with audio at exam pace, scored, repeatable, sitting inside complete simulations of the citizenship exam. The app’s dialogues and audio texts, read by quality voices, supply the daily material for the routine above, and your mistakes feed the spaced review described in error driven learning. Do the ten minutes daily and one full listening section weekly, and the section that fails most candidates becomes the one you stop fearing. The complete preparation is in the teacher’s plan.
Note and attributions: exam structures belong to the certifying bodies (CILS of the Università per Stranieri di Siena, CELI of Perugia, PLIDA of the Società Dante Alighieri, Cert.it of Roma Tre), named for identification only; confirm current formats on their official sites. The amo Italian app’s simulations are training material, not an official exam.
