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Sixty days before, and the month that just passed
The clerk's parting instruction is the one piece of information in this scene with a date attached, and it is worth writing down: a permesso di soggiorno is renewed by applying sixty days before it expires, not after. Letting it lapse turns a renewal into a new application, with the queue, the fingerprints and the months of waiting that Lesson 57 went through. Italians and foreigners alike run their administrative lives off a calendar of these advance windows, and the habit Alex names at the end of the lesson — va chiesto tutto per tempo — is the single most useful thing Block A has taught him. Francesca's other observation is the real measure of the month, though. Switching from Lei to tu mid-breath without noticing is a threshold in learning a language that has the distinction: at first every instance is a decision, and then one day it is not. Italian makes the threshold unusually visible because the shift is grammatical rather than merely lexical — the whole verb changes — and because there is a verb for the decision itself, dare del tu. Note that in much of Italy the move to tu happens faster than a learner expects, and that it is normally offered by the older or more senior person. Offering it upward is a small presumption; waiting to be offered it is never wrong.