Italian Lessons in Cheltenham

The reasons people in Cheltenham ring me are fairly consistent. A house in Umbria that came with a set of neighbours nobody can talk to. A retirement plan involving three weeks a year in Liguria. A choir singer who has spent a decade shaping Italian vowels without knowing what any of it means. An exam student who has been told to read a set text and cannot get past page two. I’m Laura Geraci. I’m from Catania, on the east coast of Sicily, and I have been teaching for over twenty years — QTS, a PGCE and a Cambridge CELTA — though what matters more to most people is that I have heard your particular worry before.

One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour, over Microsoft Teams, at whatever time survives a working week. Most people take one a week; some leave a fortnight’s gap when work gets loud, and that is fine. There is also an online beginners’ group, kept small enough that nobody can quietly hide at the back; register your interest for the next one. In-person lessons in Cheltenham can sometimes be arranged, if a screen is the thing putting you off. The number is 07786 107293, and I don’t mind being asked things before you commit to anything.

Who learns Italian in Cheltenham

Cheltenham is a town that already likes Italy at arm’s length. Coffee taken seriously, opera in the diary, a fortnight in Puglia booked well before Christmas. What tends to be missing is the ability to say anything much once you land, and that gap sits oddly with people who are competent everywhere else in their lives. So a good part of my work here is with adults who are used to being rather good at things and are about to be beginners again. Cheltenham sends me a lot of those. They are, on the whole, my favourite students to have.

“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 →

Neptune on the Promenade, and the society on Montpellier Street

If you are looking for a Little Italy in Cheltenham, I have looked for you and not found one. There is no documented Italian quarter here of the sort Bedford or the south Wales valleys had, no line of ice-cream families four generations deep, and the prisoner-of-war camp at Leckhampton Court, Camp 263, held German prisoners from 1945 rather than Italians. What Cheltenham has instead is a long habit of borrowing from Italy, and a living Italian society.

Stand on the Promenade at Neptune’s Fountain. It was designed by Joseph Hall, the borough engineer, carved from Portland stone by the local firm of R. L. Boulton and Sons, and unveiled on 30 October 1893. Neptune sits in a shell-chariot drawn by four sea-horses, with two mermen blowing conches alongside. People will tell you it is a copy of the Trevi Fountain. The truth is thinner and rather more interesting: the press of the day said only that it was built somewhat on similar lines to the great piece of statuary in Rome, and nobody has ever pinned down which Roman fountain was meant.

The Cheltenham Italian Society is the other half of the answer. As of September 2026 it was meeting at St Andrew’s Church Hall on Montpellier Street, normally one Monday a month in the early evening. Check the society’s own listing for the current date and time before you set off.

Common questions

I’m in my sixties and I was hopeless at languages at school. Am I too late to start?

No, and the school part is usually the trouble rather than the age. You were fifteen, in a room of thirty, being marked. Now you are choosing it, you know what you want it for, and nobody is grading you. Older learners are slower at memorising vocabulary and much better at everything else — spotting patterns, asking the awkward question, still being there in week nine. The pace is yours. If something needs explaining four times, I explain it four times, and it costs the same as explaining it once.

I did French to A-level and a couple of years of Latin. Does any of that carry over?

Both help, differently. French hands you thousands of words that are nearly the same and a brain already used to genders and verb endings. The trap is French pronunciation creeping in, and I will keep catching it. Latin helps more than people expect: if you have met word order that moves about and endings that carry meaning, Italian grammar feels like a relative rather than a stranger. And if you did neither, that is genuinely fine. Beginners with no other languages often move faster at the start, because there is nothing to unlearn.

What actually happens in a first lesson? I’d like to know before I book one.

We talk, mostly in English, about what you want Italian for and what you already have — a house, a grandmother, an exam, plain curiosity. Then we start. You will say something in Italian within the first half hour, badly, and that is rather the point: better to get the first mistakes out while it is only the two of us. There is no test and no book to buy beforehand. By the end I will tell you honestly how long the thing you want is likely to take, even when the answer is longer than you hoped.

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