Italian Lessons in Leicester

Here is what is available to anyone in Leicester who wants to learn Italian: live lessons with a native teacher, in the evening, from your own kitchen table. One to one, or in a small beginners’ group. I am Laura Geraci. I am from Catania, in Sicily, and I have been teaching for more than twenty years, with QTS, a PGCE and a Cambridge CELTA behind me and a long stretch of International Baccalaureate teaching as well. The adults who come to me are mostly travellers, people with Italian somewhere in the family, and the occasional exam candidate.

For the beginners’ group, register your interest and I will let you know about the next one. It is kept small on purpose: you will speak in every session, which is rather the point of it. One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour and can be booked singly — no term, no block, no notice period. Both happen on Microsoft Teams. You need a laptop or a tablet, a quiet half-hour either side, and headphones if the house is busy. My number is 07786 107293, and I would far rather you rang than sat wondering.

What brings Leicester people to Italian

Leicester is a city where a great many people already live in more than one language: Gujarati, Punjabi, Somali and English in whatever order the day requires. Italian sits well alongside that. If you grew up switching at the kitchen table, or hearing a language you never formally studied, you already have the habit most adult learners have to build from nothing — talking before you are ready. The universities send a steady trickle of people towards a year in Padua or Siena, too. And an evening on Teams asks nothing at all of the ring road at half past four.

“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 →

Horsefair Street, the Jewry Wall, and a season nobody predicted

Leicester’s oldest Italian link is Roman rather than Italian in the modern sense. The city was Ratae Corieltauvorum, and the Jewry Wall, about nine metres of standing masonry from a bath house built around AD 160, is one of the largest surviving pieces of Roman civil building anywhere in Britain. The museum beside it reopened on 26 July 2025 after years of work.

The Italian Leicester people actually remember, though, is Brucciani’s. Luigi Brucciani’s family were farmers struggling in rural Tuscany; he was a boy of thirteen when they made the journey to England in 1893, and they settled first at Barrow-in-Furness selling ice cream. He opened his Leicester coffee shop in Horsefair Street in 1937, when the hosiery and shoe trades were still going strong and the city was full of people with a little money and half an hour spare. The cafes on Church Gate and Fox Lane and the bakery on Bath Lane traded on until May 2019, more than eighty years in all.

A wider Italian community grew in Leicester after the war. The historian Kathy Burrell wrote her doctorate on Polish, Italian and Greek-Cypriot migration to the city, and her article in Urban History looks at how Italian families here described their own community decades afterwards.

Then came 2015-16, a manager from Rome, and a Premier League title. Enzo Maresca took the Championship with the same club in 2024.

Common questions

There was Italian in my family and I understood it as a child, but I never spoke it properly. Does that count for anything?

It counts for a great deal, and it comes with its own work. Heritage learners usually have an ear that a beginner spends two years building, plus vocabulary in odd patches: food, weather, being told off. What tends to be missing is the writing, the grammar nobody ever taught you, and the standard language, since what you heard at home may well have been Sicilian or Neapolitan. None of that is a deficit. We start from what is already in there and fill in around it, which is quicker than starting from nothing.

I only want to speak it. Can we skip the reading and writing?

We can weight it heavily towards speaking, and with most adults I do. Some writing earns its keep, though. Putting a sentence on paper slowly is how you notice you have been avoiding the past tense for a month. Reading comes almost free in Italian once your pronunciation has settled, because the spelling tells the truth. So: talking from the first lesson, a little writing, and reading whatever you would have read in English anyway.

How much am I meant to be doing between lessons?

Fifteen or twenty minutes on most days beats two hours the night before. Say things out loud, even alone in the car — Italian lives in the mouth, not the eye. Relisten to something you already understood rather than hunting down new material. An app is fine if it keeps you honest, but it is not the lesson. And if a week goes past and you have done none of it, come anyway. The lesson is where the work happens. The rest is maintenance.

Nearby: Nottingham · Birmingham · Peterborough