What you have to remember is that many of the Italian immigrants to the U.S., the U.K. and other parts of the world came from small towns and villages often in the south of Italy where there was crippling unemployment. Very commonly these immigrants didn’t speak ‘Italian’ but only their own dialect. In fact some of the older people in our village in Tuscany speak mainly dialect and have never studied Italian. Often when immigrants come back to Italy they find that they are also seen as foreigners here because they cannot speak Italian very well. I have met Italian immigrants who have lived in the U.K. for 30 or 40 years and have never learned to speak English very well, yet at the same time it is difficult to communicate with them in Italian because they only know the dialect that they learned in their village when they were younger.
The Italian spoken in Rome has its own particular accent and expressions. It is said that the most ‘correct’ Italian is spoken in Tuscany. However it is important to become familiar with different accents and dialects because that is the reality of the Italian language today.

Buona fortuna con i suoi studi, Serena.