My Italian skills are somewhere near an intermediate to advanced level (mostly thanks to French, Portuguese and Spanish!), and lately I have been using the Champs-Elysées Audiomagazine Acquerello Italiano to be exposed to current events in Italy while improving my reading and listening comprehension. It has worked great!

I have been very impressed with the quality of both the content and the method. With each edition of the audiomagazine, I receive:

. the magazine
. a CD with all the audio recordings
. a CD with loads of flash card exercises for the current edition
. a worksheet for the outlined vocabulary and grammar points

One of the things I most like about these audiomagazines is that each edition features recordings of Italians from all over Italy. This exposes me to a diversity of regionalisms and local accents and increases my overall comprehension when I am actually traveling in Italy.

If you are interested in this same kind of "current events + local accents + language maintenance and improvement" program for Italian, German, French or Spanish, I highly recommend the Champs-Elysées products: