Italian Lessons in Sheffield

Italian lessons for adults in Sheffield, live over Microsoft Teams, either one-to-one or in a small beginners’ group. That is what is on offer. I am Laura Geraci, born and raised in Catania, in Sicily. Italian is my first language and I have been teaching it for over twenty years, with QTS, a PGCE, a Cambridge CELTA and a good stretch teaching the International Baccalaureate. My students are grown-ups: people with a trip booked, people with Italian somewhere in the family, people with an exam in front of them. Most of them had not sat in a lesson of any kind for decades before they started.

For beginners there is an online group, and you can register your interest for the next one. The group is kept small so that everyone has to speak rather than sit at the back. It is for real beginners, and no Italian at all is exactly the right amount to arrive with. One-to-one is £30 an hour and takes whatever shape you need: weekly, fortnightly, or a run of lessons squeezed in before you fly. Both happen on Teams. If you would rather ask a few things before committing to anything, my number is 07786 107293 and I do answer it.

The Sheffield learners I tend to meet

Sheffield students learn with me over Teams, so the lesson goes wherever you are: a kitchen table in Walkley, a spare room in Nether Edge, a hotel desk if work has moved you for the week. Sheffield is a city where an evening class in January is a decision rather than a habit, mostly because of the hills and the dark. Taking the journey out of it matters more than it sounds. In my experience people rarely give up because of the grammar. They give up because it is November and going out again feels like too much.

“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 →

West Bar was Sheffield’s Little Italy

Italians appear in Sheffield records from the 1830s, and by 1860 the West Bar area was known locally as Little Italy. It was never a large community. The 1901 census counted 269 people born in Italy among Sheffield’s 381,000 residents. But it left a great deal behind. St Vincent’s on Solly Street, the city’s first Catholic church, opened in 1856 and became the community’s parish; a plaque remembering Sheffield’s Italians was unveiled there in 2013.

The ice cream trade is the part that survived in plain sight. Luigge Cuneo, who had worked as a wheelwright and a tuner of barrel organs, began selling in 1864 and opened an Ice Cream Saloon on Devonshire Street. His family are still going, more than 160 years on, with vans across the city. Luigi Granelli came from Genoa and set up on Scotland Street in 1873, moving to Broad Street the following year, where the shop has stayed ever since under his descendants. Rather later, in 1963, a Miss M Fantozzi opened what the council’s archives record as Sheffield’s first Italian dining room, at 24 Shalesmoor.

If one of those surnames is yours, or was your grandmother’s, the West Bar Italians group has spent years piecing the families back together. I have taught several people in exactly that position: enough Italian in the house growing up to recognise the sound of it, never quite enough to speak it.

Common questions

My nonna spoke Italian at home and I understand far more than I can say. Where would someone like me even start?

Not in the beginners’ course, usually. You are not a beginner and not quite an intermediate either; you are someone with a real ear, a lopsided vocabulary and gaps in the parts nobody teaches you at a kitchen table, which is generally writing, tenses and anything formal. Often the Italian in the family is a dialect rather than standard Italian. That is not a mistake to be corrected out of you. We keep it, and we build the standard language alongside it, and I will tell you which is which as we go.

I mainly want to read Italian rather than talk to anyone. Is that a strange thing to ask for?

Not remotely. People come wanting letters from relatives, opera libretti, a novel they have owned for years in translation and want in the original. One-to-one lessons can be weighted heavily that way. I will still make you read aloud, though, because Italian is spelled the way it sounds and hearing the rhythm is what stops written sentences turning into a puzzle. The beginners’ course is more balanced by nature, since a group has to talk to each other to be worth joining.

How much should I be doing between lessons?

Ten or fifteen minutes on most days beats two hours on a Sunday, and it is not close. Read something out loud, even badly. Say what you are doing while you do it. An app is a fine warm-up but it is not the meal. And if a fortnight goes by and you have done nothing at all, come to the lesson anyway. Turning up having done nothing still moves you forward; not turning up because you are ashamed is what actually ends it, and I have watched that happen more often than I would like.

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