Your expectations may be set too high if you want to be “fairly fluent” in a year. The US Dept of State has a lot of experience teaching foreign languages to diplomatic staff and they say
A typical week is 23 hours per week in class and 17 hours of self-study. Italian takes 24 weeks to reach integrated score of 3 (Speaking + Listening) on the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale,
Foreign Language Training - United States Department of State
This corresponds to CEFR Level B2/C1 so maybe you’d be willing to settle for B1: “B1 learners can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters and can deal with most situations likely to arise while traveling in an area where the language is spoken. They can also produce simple connected text on topics that are familiar or of personal interest.“ It would probably take less time to reach that level. B1 is not considered fluent but it’s the level required to get Italian citizenship.
I don’t have a personal success story of fluency but I can recommend a few programs as starting points (often available thru libraries) I’ve used in the past when traveling to Italy and France. Both are audio programs. Start with Michel Thomas Italian to get a sense of the language, verbs being what he calls the backbone. Then do Pimsleur thru all 5 levels of Italian. The Pimsleur instructions say to do a lesson daily but I found I got more from it if I repeated the lesson twice in a day. I also used Prof. Dave Italian at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLybg94GvOJ9FsOX3hUQsIm5NOJ2H6zh3a
Recall testing is important to retain what you’re studying so make flashcards (old school) or use a program like Anki, and learning sentences is said by some to be better than individual words.
BTW we were in the Dolomites (Ortisei) last fall and loved it, but the language the locals speak at home is German. Italy was on the Allied side in WWI and was ceded from Austria to Italy.