Italian Lessons in Dursley

Listers sent engines out of Dursley to places half the town never saw, Italy among them, and one of those small stationary engines is probably still turning in a yard somewhere south of Rome, being sworn at in the language I grew up speaking. Dursley has been exporting to Italy for longer than it has been learning the language, and I would like to even that up a little. My name is Laura Geraci. Born in Catania, living a few minutes from here, and teaching this language for more than twenty years, with QTS, a PGCE and a Cambridge CELTA behind me. Adults, mostly. Nervous ones especially.

One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour. Most people take them online, over Microsoft Teams, because it saves an evening drive; if you are close by, sitting at the same table can sometimes be arranged, and I will say plainly whether it suits the week or not. There is also a beginners’ group online, kept small enough that everybody speaks — register your interest for the next one. If you want to talk it over first, ring me on 07786 107293. That call is free and there is nothing to sign.

The Dursley learners I tend to meet

Living here means Dursley learners get the simplest version of the arrangement. A lesson can start at six because nobody has to drive to Gloucester or Bristol first. If the car is off the road, or the lane is under water, we move that week to Teams and lose nothing but the tea. The adults who ask me about lessons round here tend to be one of three sorts: someone with a trip or a house in Italy, someone whose grandmother spoke it and wants it back, and someone facing an exam. I have taught the International Baccalaureate, so the last of those is familiar ground.

“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 →

What Dursley’s record actually shows, and where the Italians really were

Let me deal with the awkward part first. I have looked, and I cannot find a documented Italian community in Dursley – no café family, no ice-cream dynasty, nothing resembling the migrations that shaped Bedford or the south Wales valleys. The nearest real Italian chapter in this county is over the Severn in the Forest of Dean, at Camp 61 on Wynols Hill above Broadwell. It went up in the summer of 1942, and by that July there were 482 Italian prisoners living under canvas; by 1943 there were 825. Most were put to work on the farms, in the forest and in the sawmills. A sergeant called Bruno Porciani, who arrived in November 1942, designed the camp’s little church and its theatre, and at Christmas 1944 the men built a twenty-foot monument to Marconi with a chalk bust on top. It stood until the late 1970s, when the Queensway estate was built over it.

Dursley’s own history is a different story and worth knowing on its own terms: the church spire that came down during bell-ringing in January 1699, the tower rebuilt in 1707-09 after an appeal circulated in Queen Anne’s name, her statue standing on the Market House of 1738, and Lister’s, founded in 1867, employing around five thousand people at its height before the Dursley works closed following the 2014 administration. The Italian in Dursley today is mostly Della Casa on Parsonage Street – and me, at a kitchen table in GL11.

Common questions

How is a lesson put together, week to week?

Roughly a third talking, a third something new, a third putting the new thing to work. We start in Italian from the first minute, even when that first minute is only hello and the weather, because the habit hardest to build later is speaking without rehearsing first. Then one piece of grammar, small enough to fit on a notebook page. Then something real to try it on: a menu, a train timetable, a message from a cousin. Each week picks up the thread of the one before, so it accumulates instead of resetting.

What if I have to miss a week?

You tell me and we move it. One-to-one lessons rearrange easily if I know a day ahead, and there is no charge for a session that has been moved rather than missed. In a group class, the first ten minutes of every session go back over the session before, so a gap is survivable; I will send you what the group covered and the two things worth practising before you rejoin. Nobody ever caught up by being made to feel behind.

Will I need to buy a textbook?

Not to begin with. I provide what we work from, and for the first stretch a notebook and something to write with is the whole kit. Later you might want a dictionary, and I would rather point you at a decent one than let you buy the wrong one, but that is a want and not a requirement. The course fee is the fee. Nothing else turns up on top of it.

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