This study explores the accessibility to foreigners of the information written in Italian on how to apply for a residence permit, considering the negative consequences that failure or partial comprehension of the texts could have on their lives. The results show, from the lexical viewpoint, how potentially difficult it might be to understand these texts: in the corpus used, only approximately 10% of the lemmas correspond to the CEFR A2 level and 33% of the lemmas fall within the basic vocabulary, as defined by De Mauro in the Grande Dizionario Italiano dell’Uso.