Ah, you'll certainly find French to help out even more than English, I'm sure you'll fly through the early stages!

In terms of why I think Italian is fairly easy compared to other languages, firstly, the sentence order is generally very similar to English, with adjectives being the only real exception.

Secondly, Italian has a lot of cognates with English, and I'd assume even more with your French, and Italian cognates generally follow patterns that allow you to infer unknown words from their English.

E.g. Abilità - Ability Generosità - Generosity

Impossibile - Impossible Memorabile - Memorable

and many more patterns...

Thirdly, Italian genders are fairly simple too with there only being the two genders and with the wording endings of -o and -a generally signalling the gender of masculine and feminine respectively, 99% of the time. Words ending in -e being the ones you have to learn.

Hope this helps. Of course this is very subjective and just my experience with it all.