Italian Lessons in Bedfordshire

From the next room it sounds like this. A sentence, then a long gap. The same sentence again, slower, with one word changed. A laugh. Two voices saying the same three syllables until one of them lands. Then quiet, while somebody writes. Then a question, and the whole thing starts over. That is an hour of Italian, and most of it is repetition, because repetition is what puts a phrase within reach later, in a hurry, when you actually need it. I am Laura Geraci. I am from Catania in Sicily, and I have been teaching for more than twenty years.

Lessons are one to one, £30 an hour, over Microsoft Teams. We fix a regular slot and keep it, and move it when work moves. There is also an online group for beginners; get in touch to join the next one. The group stays deliberately small, so everyone speaks in every session instead of listening to somebody else speak. Some people do both: the course for shape, the odd private hour for whatever they keep getting wrong. My number is 07786 107293, and a five-minute phone call usually settles more than an email does.

Who learns Italian in Bedfordshire

Bedfordshire is a county of separate evenings. Bedford, Luton, Leighton Buzzard, Biggleswade, Ampthill: close enough on a map, far enough apart at half past six in January. A good many people here have already spent an hour of the day on the Thameslink or the M1 and have nothing left for a further drive across the county. Luton sends flights to Italy all year round, too, which tends to mean the Italian learned in February gets tested in June. Working at a screen simply takes the travelling out of the arrangement.

“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 →

Recruited in Naples, sent to the brickfields

The Italian Bedfordshire began with a labour shortage. After the war the brickworks of the Marston Vale could not fill their kilns, so the London Brick Company and the Marston Valley Brick Company opened recruiting offices in Naples and elsewhere in Italy from the late 1940s into the mid-1950s, offering men four-year contracts. Roughly 7,500 came between 1951 and the early 1960s, most of them from the south, with Puglia and Campania particularly well represented. The full story is in my article on Britain’s Italian communities.

The numbers moved fast. Bedford counted 864 foreign nationals in total in 1951. By November 1961 a Daily Herald report now held at the National Archives put around 5,000 Italians in a town of 60,000, and recorded the borough council turning down Marston Valley’s request for another two hundred men on the grounds of overcrowding.

The first arrivals were put in hostels, some of them former prisoner-of-war camps. Midland Road became known as Little Italy. An Italian Vice-Consulate opened in 1954, and the church of St Francesca Cabrini, named for the patron saint of emigrants, was consecrated on 28 March 1965.

Stewartby, the village the brickworks built, once carried thirty-two chimneys and was the largest brickworks in the world. It closed in 2008. In 2024 Bedford Borough carried a Stewartby brick to Sicily as a gift, to a festival held by Sant’Angelo Muxaro in the province of Agrigento, the village a great many Bedford families came from.

Common questions

I’m sitting GCSE or A-level Italian as an adult, and I might go on to the IB with an international school. Do you do exam work?

Yes, and it is a good part of what I do. I hold QTS and a PGCE, I have taught the International Baccalaureate, and I know what the speaking and writing papers are really asking for, which is not always what the syllabus appears to say. We work from past papers, we rehearse the oral until it stops feeling like an ambush, and we spend time on the marks people lose for reasons that have nothing to do with their Italian.

I want to read Italian novels and write to my in-laws more than I want to chat. Can lessons be weighted that way?

They can. Reading and writing are proper skills in their own right, and some learners get far more from them. We would still speak in lessons, because saying a sentence aloud is how you find out whether you have understood it, but the homework, the texts and the corrections would sit on the page. Tell me at the start what you want to be able to do by Christmas and I will build the year backwards from it.

Do I need to buy a textbook or sign up to an app before the first lesson?

No. I send everything we use, and it is chosen for you rather than for a generic class of thirty. A notebook and a pen are worth having, because writing a phrase by hand does something that tapping it does not. If you already own a course book from a previous attempt, bring it and we will use what is good in it. The £30 covers the hour and the materials that go with it.

Nearby: Hertfordshire · Cambridge · Peterborough · London