Here you can find some useful links to Italian newspapers, magazines and other resources.
In IT301 essay writing we focus much on newspaper articles as they are
a. examples of testi argomentativi;
b. in your exam you will need to summarize one of them

Reading one/two article(s) in Italian per week, other than your HW, can be very beneficial to improve your essay writing techniques.
A good idea may be to surf the webpage of an Italian newspaper everyday: spending 5 minutes to read the news in Italian is a good exercise to improve your vocabulary, too.