Italian Lessons in Hertfordshire

The 18.42 out of King’s Cross has views of its own. It runs late, or it does not run at all, and by the time you are through your own front door in Hitchin the class you meant to join in St Albans has already done its introductions without you. Hertfordshire loses more Italian learners to the timetable than to anything else. So the lesson goes after the commute instead of inside it. You get home, you sit down, we start. And if the trains have been dreadful, that is a perfectly good thing to complain about in Italian.

One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour over Microsoft Teams, at whatever hour genuinely works — early, late, or a lunch break. If you would rather learn alongside other beginners, I also run online groups small enough that everybody speaks, and you can register your interest for the next one. I am from Catania in Sicily, and I have taught for over twenty years: QTS, a PGCE, a Cambridge CELTA, and years of International Baccalaureate teaching behind me. Ring me on 07786 107293, tell me what you want Italian for, and we will work out which of the two suits you.

Learning Italian from Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire adults come to me for concrete reasons. A house near Lucca that the family uses every August. A daughter-in-law from Bergamo. A job that keeps putting Milan in the diary. There are plenty of learners in the county, and the classes that survive tend to sit in a town that is not your town — fine from St Albans, rather less so from Royston or Tring on a wet Tuesday. Working online takes the geography out of it altogether. Ware, Watford, Hemel, Bishop’s Stortford: the same lesson, the same teacher, and no drive across the county at half past six.

“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.”
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The Sicilians of the Lee Valley

Hertfordshire’s Italian history is largely a Sicilian one, which is part of why I warm to it. From the late 1950s, Sicilian families came to work the glasshouses of the Lee Valley and settled in the market towns strung along it, Hoddesdon and Broxbourne especially. A good number came from Sutera, a hill town in the province of Caltanissetta, inland and west of Catania where I grew up. When land came up for sale, some of those families bought it and started nurseries of their own, and word travelled home. The Lea Valley Growers Association reckons that more than seventy of the hundred or so nurseries in the valley are now in the hands of Sicilian descendants, growing roughly three quarters of Britain’s cucumbers. Broxbourne and Sutera were twinned at the millennium.

There was an older layer beneath that. By the early 1960s around 2,500 Italians were living in south-west Hertfordshire, many of them in Watford, working on farms and in the hospitals. Monsignor Angelo Carminati arrived in 1965 to run an Italian mission and moved into a house on Percy Road the following year; Italian Mass has been said on Sunday mornings there ever since. Earlier still, No. 95 camp at Batford, just outside Harpenden, opened in May 1943 and held some 600 Italian prisoners of war, most of whom were eventually working the farms around them, and in November 1944 several were lodged on the farms themselves.

Common questions

Would I be better off in the group course or having lessons one to one?

They suit different people. A small group gives you a fixed slot, a set of classmates who are also just starting, and the comfort of not being the only one making mistakes. One-to-one at £30 an hour goes entirely at your pace, follows whatever you actually need Italian for, and can be moved when the trains or the diary conspire. Plenty of people begin in the group and add the odd one-to-one when something specific is looming, like a trip or a family visit. Tell me what your week looks like and I will say which I would choose in your position.

How much practice do I actually need to do between lessons?

Fifteen minutes on most days beats two hours on a Sunday evening. The language settles overnight, so little and often is what works. Practical things travel well on a commute: listen again to the recording of your own lesson, read a short piece aloud on the platform under your breath, name what you can see out of the window in Italian until you run out of nouns. If a week goes badly and you do none of it, come anyway. A lesson missed is worse than a lesson unprepared.

What sort of homework do you set?

Short, and always attached to the next lesson rather than sitting there as a task in its own right. Usually one of three things: ten sentences to write using whatever we did that week, a paragraph to read aloud and send me as a voice note, or a two-minute listening with three questions under it. It takes twenty minutes or so. I mark it, and where something has gone wrong we start the next lesson there, because your own errors are far better teaching material than anything in a textbook.

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