Italian Lessons in Cirencester

Italian lessons are available to anyone in Cirencester who wants them: one to one, or in a small beginners’ group, taught by me over Microsoft Teams from my house near Dursley, and in person now and then when that suits us both. My name is Laura Geraci. I grew up in Catania, in Sicily, and I have been teaching for more than twenty years — schools, adult classes, and the International Baccalaureate along the way. The people I teach now are mostly grown-ups. Some are going to Italy, some have Italian somewhere in the family, and a few are working towards an exam.

The one-to-one rate is £30 an hour. We agree a time, I send you a Teams link, and you keep that slot for as long as it is useful to you. If you would rather begin alongside other beginners, register your interest in my next online beginners’ group. The group is deliberately small, because a beginner who never gets to speak is not really learning. Ring me on 07786 107293 if you want to talk it over before deciding. I would far rather you asked me now than guessed and got it wrong.

Who learns Italian in Cirencester

Cirencester is a market town with a long habit of people coming in from the villages around it, and that shape suits online lessons better than most people assume. Nobody has to drive back down an unlit lane in February for the sake of an hour’s Italian. You sit at your own kitchen table at half past seven, we work, and afterwards you are already home. I have taught this way for years now and I stopped thinking of it as second best some time ago. The awkward part is always the first ten minutes of speaking, and that is awkward in any room.

“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 →

The word square dug up on Victoria Road in 1868

Cirencester’s connection to Italy is genuine but old, and Roman rather than modern. This was Corinium Dobunnorum. When the walls went up in the late second century they enclosed 240 acres, making it the second largest town in Roman Britain after London, with a population above ten thousand. The Fosse Way and Ermin Street met here. The amphitheatre on the edge of town, built early in the second century, held something like eight thousand people.

The piece I find hardest to walk past is much smaller. In 1868, while a garden on Victoria Road was being levelled, workmen turned up painted wall plaster from a Roman house with five words scratched into it: ROTAS OPERA TENET AREPO SATOR. It reads the same forwards, backwards, downwards and upwards. The identical square was scratched on a wall in Pompeii before Vesuvius buried the town in AD 79. Two towns, one puzzle, and scholars still arguing over what it meant and whether early Christians wrote it.

The Corinium Museum also holds the Orpheus mosaic, lifted from Barton Farm just outside town in 1824 to 1825, a fourth-century floor showing Orpheus charming the animals with his lyre.

One honest caveat. I could not find a documented Italian migrant community in Cirencester of the kind Bedford or Glasgow had. The Latin here is real. A Little Italy is not.

Common questions

My mother was Italian and I understood everything as a child, but I never spoke it. Where does someone like me start?

Not at the beginning, usually. You are carrying more than you think — the sounds, the rhythm, the shape of how things are said — and it tends to come back quicker than you expect. What is missing is normally the machinery: tenses, writing, the nerve to open your mouth in front of relatives. So we find where the gaps actually are instead of assuming. One thing I say kindly: what you heard at home may have been dialect rather than standard Italian. That is not an error to be corrected. It is a second thing you own.

I mainly want to read Italian rather than talk to anyone. Do I still have to do the speaking?

You do not, though I will nudge. Reading and speaking pull on different muscles, and plenty of my students care far more about getting through a novel, a bundle of family letters or a libretto than about ordering coffee. We can weight the lessons that way from the start. I would still have you read sentences aloud, because saying Italian is how the grammar settles in your head, but nobody will be made to act out a scene at a railway station if that is not what they came for.

How much should I be doing between lessons?

Twenty minutes on most days beats two hours on a Sunday. Little and often is not a slogan, it is simply how memory behaves. I will usually send something small: a handful of sentences, something to listen to, sometimes a page to read. If a week goes badly and you do none of it, say so and we adjust rather than both pretending. People who do nothing at all between lessons do still improve. They improve slowly and buy more hours, which strikes me as a poor bargain.

Nearby: Stroud · Cheltenham · Swindon · Gloucestershire · Dursley