Venanzio Rauzzini came to Bath in 1777 and never left. He was a singer from the Marche, and when his stage career ended he spent thirty-odd years here teaching other people to use their voices. He died in the city in 1810. Bath has an old habit of this: an Italian arrives, and before long is in a room with somebody, going over the same phrase until it sits right. That is more or less my job, minus the singing. My name is Laura Geraci. I am from Catania, in Sicily, and I have been teaching Italian to adults for more than twenty years.
One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour, online over Microsoft Teams, and for Bath in person can sometimes be arranged, depending on the day and the part of the city. There is also a beginners’ group, and you can register your interest in the next one. That one is online and the group is deliberately small, which matters: everybody speaks, nobody hides. Otherwise I take adults at any stage, from people with a trip booked to people sitting exams. QTS, PGCE, Cambridge CELTA, and years of International Baccalaureate teaching behind all of it. Phone 07786 107293.
Why Italian, and why here
Bath enquiries tend to come from two directions. Either a trip has gone from vague to booked and the phrasebook is clearly not going to cover it, or there is a family connection that has gone quiet: a parent, a grandparent, a house someone still half owns. Either way the hard part is the same, and it is not grammar. It is saying your first sentence out loud to another human being. I live over near Dursley, which is why sitting across a real table is on the list at all. Most people try it once and then keep the screen anyway.
Ready to start? Ask about small-group classes for beginners
Prefer one to one? See how online lessons work
Not ready yet? Grab the free 50 Essential Italian Phrases PDF
Want a tutor rather than a class? How I work as an Italian tutor
Or ask Laura a question
“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 →
Palladio’s rejected bridge — built twice, in Bath
Andrea Palladio drew a design for the Rialto in Venice and the Venetians turned it down. Bath built it anyway, and built it twice. Ralph Allen had a Palladian bridge raised over the lakes at Prior Park in 1755, the work carried out by Richard Jones; it is the last of its kind in England and one of only four of that design left in the world. Then Robert Adam, who had seen the Ponte Vecchio and the Rialto with his own eyes, took the same rejected Italian drawing as his starting point for Pulteney Bridge, built between 1769 and 1774, and gave its river fronts Venetian windows. Shops the whole way across, both sides — one of only four bridges anywhere that can say so.
The debt runs through the rest of the city as well. John Wood the Elder laid the first stone of the Circus in 1754 and stacked its three orders — Doric, then Ionic, then Corinthian — in the manner of the Colosseum, though he turned the whole thing outside in. He died within three months; his son finished it in 1768.
The connection is even formally on the books. On 24 July 2021 UNESCO inscribed the Great Spa Towns of Europe: eleven towns across seven countries. Bath is one. So is Montecatini Terme, in Tuscany.
Common questions
What does a week actually look like? I would like to know what I am signing up to.
Each lesson has one thing at the centre of it, and everything else hangs off that. We start by using what you had last week, because that is how I find out what really landed and what only looked like it did. Then the new thing, out loud, several times, in sentences that belong to your life rather than to a textbook family. You go away with something small to do. Ten minutes, most days, beats an hour on a Sunday night. The following week I plan around whatever went wrong.
If I have to miss a week, does that ruin it?
No. For one-to-one lessons, tell me with some notice and we move it. In a group, missing one session is not a disaster: I will write to you with what we covered and what to practise, and you come back to the next one. What does damage progress is disappearing for a month and then apologising. Say nothing else, just send me a message. I have taught adults for twenty years. Work, illness and school runs are not a surprise to me.
Do I need to buy a textbook before we start?
No. Bring nothing. A notebook if you are the sort of person who likes paper, and that is genuinely it. I send what we need, and for the beginners’ course the materials come from me. Later on, once I know how you learn and where you are heading, I may point you at one particular book and tell you why. That is different from asking you to spend forty pounds on a course pack in week one, on the strength of a lesson you have not had yet.