Italian Lessons in Cambridge

Italian holds its double consonants. Sete is thirst; sette is seven, and the difference is one t held a beat longer, the way you might lean on a note. English speakers skip it for months and nobody minds much, until the day someone hands you six of something when you meant seven. I mention it because it is the sort of small, learnable, entirely fixable detail that people like to have explained properly rather than waved past: the rule, the reason, the thing to go away and practise. Cambridge is not short of people built that way. Lessons with me are online, an hour at a time, mostly in the evening.

Two things are running at the moment. One-to-one lessons at £30 an hour, arranged around whatever your week actually looks like. And an online beginners’ group: register your interest and I will be in touch about the next one. The group is kept small on purpose, so nobody spends the lesson quietly hiding at the back. Everything runs on Microsoft Teams; you need a laptop and a room where you do not mind talking out loud. If you already have some Italian, one-to-one is usually the better route, because we can start where you are rather than at the beginning. My number is 07786 107293.

The Cambridge learners I tend to meet

Cambridge turns out a particular sort of learner: the researcher who reads Italian sources but has never had to say one out loud, the sixth-former whose school dropped the subject, the couple with a June fortnight in Umbria booked, the person whose father spoke it at home and always answered in English. A city with that much reading in it is rarely short of people who can parse a page. Speaking is a separate muscle, and it only grows by being used, badly, in front of somebody patient. That is what the hour is for, and it survives a screen intact.

“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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A professorship, a prison camp and a Neapolitan baker

Cambridge’s Italian story runs on more than one track. The academic one is the easiest to date. In 1917 Arthur Serena, a London shipbroker and the son of the Venetian patriot Leone Serena, gave the University ten thousand pounds to found a chair of Italian. Thomas Okey held it first, from 1919 to 1929, and the Serena Professorship remains the senior Italian post at Cambridge. Serena endowed chairs at Manchester and Birmingham too, and the British Academy still awards a Serena Medal in his name.

The second track is quieter. During the war there was a prisoner-of-war camp on the west side of Hauxton Road in Trumpington, Camp 45, which held Italians when the International Red Cross inspected it on 9 February 1943, with room for 750 men. A number of them worked on the farms around the village, and the Trumpington Local History Group records that some lodged with local farmers after the war rather than going home.

Then came the shops. Balzano’s bakery was started in 1965 by a young man from Naples. Limoncello opened as a deli in 1992. Aromi, at 1 Bene’t Street since 2013, is run by a Sicilian family who brought the recipes over from their own café at home, which is the part of the story I feel closest to. La Dante in Cambridge has been running Italian classes and PLIDA exams in the city for years. Cambridge has known this language for a century, in several different registers.

Common questions

My son is doing Italian at A-level and the speaking paper is the part that worries him. Is that something you take on?

Yes, and it is often the most fixable part. I have QTS and a PGCE, and I have taught the International Baccalaureate, so I know what these papers are actually asking for, which is usually less than students fear and far more structured than they expect. Before we start I want to see the specification and a recent piece of marked work, so the hour goes on the weak spot rather than on a pleasant general chat. GCSE, A-level and IB are all fine. One-to-one, £30 an hour.

Is teaching a sixteen-year-old very different from teaching someone my age?

Different work, yes. Teenagers have a syllabus, a deadline and comparatively little embarrassment; they usually pick up the sound quickly and want the why afterwards, if at all. Adults are the other way round. They want the grammar explained before they will risk saying anything, they carry a fear of getting it wrong that no fifteen-year-old wastes energy on, and they have perhaps a fifth of the practice time. I have spent twenty years with both. The CELTA side of my training is adult teaching specifically, and it is the half I lean on most.

How would I know whether I am actually improving, and not just enjoying myself?

The honest marker is not vocabulary count, it is what happens when a sentence goes off-script. Early on you repeat after me, which is safe. Progress is the week you answer a question you were not expecting and only notice afterwards that you did. I also ask people to record themselves speaking for a minute in week one, then again at the end; nobody believes they have moved until they hear it. If you like frameworks, CEFR levels give you a ladder. And I will tell you plainly when you are stuck, and what to do about it.

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