Italian Lessons in Cardiff

Wales and Italy have the same reflex when someone arrives unannounced. Something goes on the stove, something is put in front of you, and refusing it is not really an option. Feeding people is a way of talking. In Italy the food arrives with a running commentary — what is in it, who taught them to make it, why the version from the next village is wrong — and that commentary is where the language actually lives. Grammar is the scaffolding round the building. The building is being able to sit at a table and have an opinion. That is where most of my adults start.

If you are starting at the beginning, there are online group classes, small enough that nobody sits at the back — register your interest for the next one. One-to-one is £30 an hour, and that is the route most people take when there is a date in the diary or a week that will not sit still. Everything happens over Microsoft Teams, which is how Cardiff and Gloucestershire end up at the same table. Behind it: QTS, a PGCE, a Cambridge CELTA, the International Baccalaureate, and twenty years of teaching adults. The number is 07786 107293.

Who learns Italian in Cardiff

Cardiff has an advantage it tends not to notice. A great many people here have already had a second language in the mouth — Welsh at school, Welsh on the road signs, Welsh from a grandparent even if it never fully stuck. That does something to the ear. You already know a language can run on its own logic rather than being English rearranged, and that a word changing its first letter is not done to spite you. Learners who have been through that once argue with Italian rather less. Lessons are online, so every part of the city is equally close.

“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 →

Bardi, the bracchi, and the names read aloud each July

Wales has one of the best documented Italian migrations in Britain, and Cardiff sits at the middle of it. Most of the families came from a single stretch of the Apennines, the Ceno valley around the hill town of Bardi, south-west of Parma. In the 1890s Giacomo Bracchi opened what is generally counted as the first Italian café and ice-cream shop in Wales, in the Rhondda, and the name stuck so completely that in Welsh usage any Italian café became a bracchi. By the mid-1930s there were more than three hundred of them across south Wales. From the 1900s, boys as young as twelve were being brought over from Bardi to work behind those counters. The full story is in my article on Britain’s Italian communities.

Then came 1940. Italy declared war on 10 June and Italian men across Britain were interned within days. On 2 July the Arandora Star, carrying internees to Canada, was torpedoed off the Irish coast. More than eight hundred people drowned, fifty-three of them Welsh Italians. A memorial to them stands in St David’s Metropolitan Cathedral in Cardiff, placed there by the Welsh/Italian Association, and each year at the start of July the archdiocese holds a commemorative Mass at which every name on it is read aloud.

The community did not fade. Amici Val Ceno Galles has been going since 1976, and Italy’s honorary vice-consul in Cardiff, Dr Bruna Chezzi, works from St Andrew’s Crescent and wrote the standard account of Italians in Wales.

Common questions

My family spoke Italian around me growing up and I understand far more than I can say. Where does that put me?

Somewhere quite different from an absolute beginner. The understanding is already there; the gap is production, endings, tenses, and the polite forms nobody bothered with at home. What families hand down is often a regional variety rather than standard Italian, so a good part of the work is naming what you already own instead of throwing it out. I teach heritage learners as sorting rather than building. The speaking usually comes back faster than expected, once there is somewhere to make the mistakes that is not the family kitchen.

We’re going to Italy in the spring. How far can I realistically get by then?

Further than you would think, because the trip gives us a date to work back from. Ten or twelve one-to-one hours will cover arriving, eating, buying, asking directions, and the small talk that decides how you are treated for the rest of the week. We work on your actual journey — the town you are going to, the things you will need to say in it — rather than a general tour of the language. Two or three months’ notice is comfortable. Six weeks is still well worth doing.

How much homework are we talking about?

Small and frequent. Fifteen or twenty minutes on four days does more than an hour and a half on a Sunday night, because a language needs disturbing regularly rather than visiting. Usually it is a short listening task, something to read aloud so your mouth does the work, and a handful of phrases to reuse during the week. I tie it to your own life — your job, your family, the trip — so it reads less like a school exercise. You send nothing in for marking. We look at it together at the start of the next lesson.

Nearby: Bristol · Bath