[riquito]

Not the parent, but... it's not that difficult. You have to apply yourself, of course, but there is a connection (once you get the gist of the declinations, as italian you can understand a certain amount of words without looking at a dictionary). Difficulty varies a lot based on who writes though: e.g. Caesar is very easy, because he purposefully wrote in a simpler, clear way (less number of terms overall, trying to avoid synonyms, straight to the point).

In Italy if you follow classical studies you learn ancient Greek too (first 2 years of high school), which was definitely harder than latin, but you grock the alphabet in a short time. I seem to recall that more often than not the same word had very different meanings depending on the context, while the grammar was similar to latin (well, of course it's backward...).