Something else people should keep in mind (i don't mean for this to apply to you, i just don't want to make a separate post) is that people will give you language learning advice and claim to speak a language when they can't watch tv, listen to podcasts, or read books in it. If you aspire to this kind of level (no judgement if you don't) do not listen to anyone who hasn't reached it.
There are textbooks that sit somewhere between "Baby's First Italian Reader" and "A First Course in Italian Grammar". A high school or college freshman text can be worked through pretty quickly by a motivated individual and are often more practical than the sort of textbook a pedantic grammarian might seek out, but faster than (only) trying to infer the rules from a participatory experience that isn't always easy to get.
It's not like I'm thinking up all the terms that a sentence could possibly consist of, and then finding them in the text. Reading left-to-right you know what kind of word to expect next. It also helps you fill in unknown words based on their context.