Most people come wanting the subjunctive and the passato remoto. What they use, six months later, is smaller and stranger: asking for something to be repeated, agreeing while they think, saying they have understood roughly but not exactly, naming a thing when the word for it has gone. The grammar does arrive, and it matters. It is simply not the part that carries you through a cousin’s wedding, or a long phone call with an aunt who talks quickly. So we build the useful order first, and the difficult tenses come later, once there is a conversation to put them in.
I am Laura Geraci, from Catania, twenty years and more of teaching behind me, with QTS, a PGCE and the Cambridge CELTA. One to one is £30 an hour over Microsoft Teams, arranged around whatever your week honestly looks like rather than an ideal version of it. For a proper beginning there are group classes, kept small enough that nobody can sit quietly at the back; get in touch to join the next one. Ring 07786 107293 if you would rather ask than read. I am happy to talk for ten minutes and tell you which of the two suits you.
What Edinburgh students usually want
Edinburgh’s year is not evenly shaped. August turns the city inside out, the dark comes down at four in December, and a great many people work hours that somebody else designed. A weekly lesson either survives all that or it quietly stops in November. Ours moves. If the Festival takes your usual evening, we find another evening; if a rota flips, the lesson flips with it. The hour itself stays the same whether you are in Morningside, Corstorphine or a flat in Gorgie with the heating on and the door shut.
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Fontitune to Elm Row, by way of Leith
Edinburgh’s Italians clustered first around the Grassmarket in the late nineteenth century, then settled in numbers down in Leith, where cafes and fish and chip shops became a trade in their own right. The best-known survivor of that migration is Valvona & Crolla at 19 Elm Row, at the top of Leith Walk, opened in 1934 by Alfonso Crolla, who had come from Fontitune, a hamlet in Lazio between Rome and Naples. It is still a family business, run now by his grandson Philip Contini and his great-granddaughter Olivia, the fourth generation behind that counter.
The sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi was born in Leith in 1924 to Rodolfo and Carmela, who had emigrated from Viticuso and kept an ice cream shop there.
Then came the night of 10 June 1940. Italy declared war, and crowds of up to two thousand moved through Leith; police recorded more than a hundred shops attacked, and at Valvona & Crolla the wine ran out across the pavement through the broken glass. Three weeks later, on 2 July, the Arandora Star was torpedoed while carrying interned Italians to Canada. Of the 712 men who drowned, 446 were Italian. Paolozzi lost his father, his grandfather and an uncle on that ship.
Common questions
My grandparents spoke Italian at home and I understand far more than I can say. Where does that leave me?
In a better position than you think, and in an awkward one. You have the ear, the rhythm and a store of words that no beginner has. The gaps tend to be in reading, in writing, and in the standard forms, because what you heard at home was a particular family speaking a particular region. I do not try to correct that out of you. We keep it, and we build the rest alongside, so you can write a letter as well as follow an argument.
How long before I can actually hold a conversation, honestly?
With a lesson a week and fifteen minutes on most other days, a short real conversation is a matter of months rather than years: ordering, small talk, describing your week, asking someone about theirs. Following a fast family argument, or arguing back, takes considerably longer. The thing that changes the timescale is not talent. It is the fifteen minutes.
I work shifts and the childcare changes weekly. Can lessons move around?
One to one, yes. The slot is yours by agreement, not by decree, and it moves week to week when it has to. Teams means no travelling either way, so a lesson can happen in a gap that would be useless for anything else. Group classes are the exception, since they keep a fixed slot for the group’s sake. If that is impossible for you, take private hours instead.