Italian Lessons in Peterborough

The Italian I am asked for in Peterborough usually has a reason attached to it. A wedding in Puglia in the spring. A son-in-law whose mother speaks no English and never intends to. A trip postponed twice already. An A-level that needs rescuing, or a GCSE being taken twenty years late. Occasionally somebody who wants something to think about on a Thursday night that is not work. I am Laura Geraci. I grew up in Catania, in Sicily, and I have taught Italian for more than twenty years, with QTS, a PGCE, a Cambridge CELTA and several years teaching the International Baccalaureate. I teach adults, and I teach them online.

Two things are running. One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour over Microsoft Teams, built around whatever your reason is: if the wedding is in May, we work backwards from May. There is also an online group for beginners, and you can register your interest for the next one. The group stays small. That way everyone gets a proper turn to speak; in a crowded class the quiet ones never do, and they are always the ones who stop coming. If you cannot tell which would suit you, ring me on 07786 107293 and describe the reason. I will say honestly which one I would put you in.

What brings Peterborough people to Italian

Everything I teach in Peterborough happens over Teams, and I have taught that way long enough to know what it does well. Nobody has to drive anywhere in February. The lesson slots into the gap between the school run and dinner, or into the evening once the train back from King’s Cross has finally delivered you. Your own dictionary stays on your own shelf. I share my screen, you write things down, and whatever we make in the lesson sits in the chat afterwards, still there on Saturday when you have decided you have forgotten the lot.

“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, settled in Fletton

This is one of the best documented Italian migrations in England, and it is worth knowing properly. From around 1951 the London Brick Company was asked to take on Italian workers from the regions of highest unemployment, and for the next six years or so its representatives travelled to Naples annually to recruit. The men came mainly from Apulia and Campania, most of them off the land and straight into shift work at the kilns. By 1960 roughly three thousand Italian men were on London Brick’s books, the bulk of them at the Fletton works.

What grew out of that was a community rather than a workforce. The Scalabrini Fathers, an order founded to look after Italian migrants, ran a mission church, St Anthony’s on Fairfield Road, open from 1960 until structural problems closed it in 2010; by 1991 it had christened more than three thousand second-generation Italians. Part of Fletton Cemetery is given over largely to Italian Catholic families. The Fleet, the Italian Community Association, still stands on Fleet Way off Fletton High Street. By 1996 the city’s Italian community was reckoned at about seven thousand people, the third largest in the country after London and Bedford.

Peterborough has been twinned with Forlì since 1981 and keeps a friendship link with Foggia, in Apulia, one of the two regions those recruiters worked in.

Common questions

I’m in my sixties and I haven’t studied anything since school. Have I left it too long?

No. Adults are slower than teenagers at holding new words overnight and better at almost everything else: you can be told how a tense works and actually use it, you spot patterns, you know why you are here. Write things down; nobody is marking you on doing it from memory. What stops most late beginners is not the brain, it is the embarrassment of hearing themselves make a strange noise in front of someone. In my lessons that noise is the work, not a sign you are failing at it.

I did French to O-level and a bit of Latin. Does any of that carry over?

More than you would expect. Latin gives you the roots of a great many Italian words and a tolerance for sentences that arrange themselves differently from English ones. French gives you gendered nouns and verbs that change their endings, so those ideas are not new, and a fair amount of vocabulary you can guess your way into. Both leave you with pronunciation habits I will spend a few weeks undoing. Italian sounds every letter and sounds it the same way each time, which is a gift once you start trusting it.

What actually happens in a first lesson?

I ask why you are doing this, and I listen properly, because the answer changes everything that follows. Then we begin: the sounds, your name, where you are from, a handful of things you would genuinely say. You do not need to buy a book beforehand. By the end you will have said something in Italian and understood something said back to you, which is deliberate. People who spend a first lesson only hearing about Italian tend not to come to a second. Notes follow afterwards, and I do not set much homework in week one.

Nearby: Cambridge · Bedfordshire · Leicester