I haven't and won't do Italian for VCE, but I did do Chinese 3/4 this year and will do French 3/4 next year, and I can say that Chinese really drained me this year.
There is a lot of work required to perfect
all the areas of a LOTE: reading, speaking, listening, writing (and translation, with Chinese). In particular, the oral component was rather difficult: preparing the detailed study content took a long time and memorising it required even more effort - the general conversation was even more annoying. While, obviously, cramming is not the
best way to do a language, I found that I ended up doing a lot of rote memorisation this year and that took a lot of mental effort.
Learning a language requires non-stop consolidation of new vocabulary, phrasings, grammatical concepts, and pronunciation - that's one of the reasons why LOTEs scale quite a bit
Obviously, if you are aiming high, then that will definitely require a lot of effort and time. There is no easy path to do well in VCE in general, and that particularly applies for LOTEs. Still, learning foreign languages is definitely interesting and a worthwhile investment of your time.