Italian Lessons in Leeds

Leeds is big enough that the reasons run in grooves. A wedding in Puglia next June. A daughter who has moved to Milan and a mother-in-law who speaks no English. Retirement that involves six weeks in Umbria rather than a fortnight. An oral exam in the spring. A surname the family has been mispronouncing for three generations. I am Laura Geraci, from Catania in Sicily, and I have been teaching Italian for more than twenty years — secondary classrooms, adult evening groups, the International Baccalaureate. These days I teach adults, one at a time or in small groups, over a screen.

Two ways in. One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour, fitted around whatever your week actually looks like — early, late, fortnightly if fortnightly is more honest than weekly. Or you can get in touch about joining the next beginners’ group. The group is small, so nobody gets to hide at the back. It all runs on Microsoft Teams, which most people already have and the rest of us install with mild swearing. If you want to ask something before committing to anything, the number is 07786 107293.

Learning Italian from Leeds

Leeds does not lack for Italian. Opera North sings a great deal of it at the Grand, the universities send people off to Bologna and Padua every year, and a good number of the flights out of Leeds Bradford land within sight of a lake or a duomo. None of that helps you order a coffee, though, or follow what somebody’s mother is saying at speed. That part takes lessons, and lessons take time you have to find on a weekday evening after work. Online is simply the version of that which does not also cost you a bus ride.

“Laura is a great teacher — warm, friendly, knowledgeable and encouraging. I really like the style of the lessons with a combination of conversation and worked exercises.”
— Jess  Read all my Google reviews →

The tingalary man of Hunslet, and other Leeds Italians

Leeds had no Italian quarter, but Italians left marks on the city all the same, and one of them I am particularly fond of.

Vincenzo Luigi Tomasso, born 1862, died 1944, was a musician who for forty years ran a workshop in Hunslet building barrel organs, mostly hired out to street performers. When it closed in 1942 it was one of only four such workshops left in the country. That closure is usually given as the end of the tingalary man in Leeds: the organ grinder pushing his instrument from street to street, sometimes with a monkey, always with children trailing after him.

Earlier still came the Fattorini family, Italian immigrants who reached Leeds in the early nineteenth century. Antonio Fattorini opened a shop in Harrogate in 1831 to catch the spa season, and in the 1850s another in Bradford with two of his sons. The firm went on to make the FA Cup and the Rugby League Challenge Cup.

And nearer our own time, Marco Pierre White was born in Leeds in 1961 to Maria-Rosa Gallina, who had come from the Genoa area. She died when he was six, and he has spoken since about her cooking and about summers spent in Italy. Salvo’s in Headingley, which Salvatore Dammone opened in August 1976 and his sons John and Gip ran for decades afterwards, fed a good part of the city on that same kind of food.

Common questions

I’m in my sixties and I haven’t learned anything new since school. Is it too late to start?

No, and most weeks I would argue the opposite. Adults notice patterns that children walk straight past, and you can be told why something works instead of just being made to repeat it. What does change with age is patience with yourself. You will forget a word you knew perfectly on Tuesday, and you will take that far more personally than a fifteen-year-old would. That part I can help with as much as the grammar. Progress is slower than you would like and faster than you expect, which is roughly true of everyone.

I did French at school and a term of Latin. Does any of that carry over?

More than you would think. Latin gives you the skeleton: endings that carry meaning, word families you can guess your way into. French hands you perhaps a third of the vocabulary for nothing, since the two grew from the same soil. The catch is pronunciation. French trains you to swallow the ends of words, and Italian wants every last vowel said out loud, so that is a habit to unlearn rather than a wall to climb. Italian spelling is honest, too. What is written is what is said, which French never once allowed you.

What actually happens in a first lesson?

We talk, mostly. I want to know what you want Italian for and how much you already have, because someone with a Sicilian grandmother and someone starting from zero need quite different first months. Then we do some sound work — Italian has five clean vowels, and getting them right early saves years of correction — and you leave able to say a handful of true things about yourself. Nothing to buy beforehand. No test. If you hate it, you have lost an hour and £30, and I would rather you found that out early.

Nearby: Manchester · Sheffield · Liverpool · Newcastle