Bug reporting is really helpful for smaller projects. My personal policy is to check if a big has already been reported. If it hasn't, go to the project forum and ask if I'm doing something wrong. If it turns out there's an actual issue, I report it as a bug. You can go straight to reporting it after step one if you want but I usually just make sure.

Codeberg recently held a translation event where projects could sign up, if they wanted help. You can still look at their resources here, or I guess, you can just pick out a project and start translating over here: https://translate.codeberg.org/

I know KDE has a page looking for contributors, including translators, I don't know how much they need more Italian translators though.

https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved

I started with Linux in 2002 and about 10 years before I developed my software engineering skillset.

During that time I used to contribute to enlightenment (the desktop environment) because my trekkie obsession led me into making a LCARS interface and there was an online community of trekkies who friendly completed against each other over who can make the better LCARS interface and I got sucked in.

I don't know if that's still a thing about in the FOSS world these days; but I do know that contributors to volunteer projects today follow the same guidelines that the professionals use and I think there's plenty of opportunity there if you can find one of your interests that has any overlap with IT or software development (the later pays SIGNIFICANTLY better).

Also take into account that I'm probably full of shit. Lemmy has been teaching me that I got lucky and my only intention is to share my experience with someone who asked the same question I did to a forum of Linux focused strangers 25ish years ago.

There are websites like https://www.firsttimersonly.com/ that will help you in getting started

Maybe you can also find open source communities in your area. After some digging, I was surprised how many groups there are in my area and they are always happy to get additional hands to organize stuff or run errands etc.