Italian Lessons in Gloucester

“Am I too old to start?” It is the question I hear most, usually from someone in their fifties who did French at school and did not enjoy it. No, is the short answer. Adults learn a language differently from children, not worse. You already understand how a sentence is built, you know what you want to say, and you can tell me when something has not landed. What you tend to have less of is patience with yourself. I am Sicilian, from Catania, I live near Dursley, and I have spent over twenty years teaching adults exactly this — QTS, PGCE, Cambridge CELTA, and years on the International Baccalaureate.

Gloucester is close enough to me that lessons in person can sometimes be arranged. Ask when you ring and we will see what the week allows. Everything else runs on Microsoft Teams, which is where most people end up once they have weighed a round trip against an hour at their own kitchen table. One to one is £30 an hour, shaped around whatever you are actually trying to do with the language. If you would rather begin alongside other beginners, I also run small online groups; register your interest for the next one. The number is 07786 107293.

Who learns Italian in Gloucester

Gloucester is near enough to me that I think of it as a place rather than a postcode on an enquiry form. That is why in person can sometimes be arranged here, though I will say honestly that most people settle on Teams once they have weighed up the parking. Adults do not usually take up Italian for a CV. It is a house someone has bought in Le Marche, or a partner’s family who all talk at once, or a son who has settled in Bologna and shows no sign of coming home.

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Colonists, and the Italian paintings at Highnam

Gloucester’s oldest tie to my language is Latin rather than Italian. The Roman fort here became Colonia Nervia Glevensium in AD 97, when the emperor Nerva raised it to a colonia, one of only four in Roman Britain, and settled retired legionaries on farmland round about. Italian is what Latin eventually turned into, so in a roundabout way the city has been hearing a version of it for nineteen hundred years.

I should be straight about the rest. Gloucester has no recorded Little Italy. The Victoria County History’s account of the city’s social life names Ukrainian, Irish and West Indian communities settling here after the war, and the mosques built by its Muslim residents, but no Italian one.

There is a real Italian thread, though, and it runs through one man. Thomas Gambier Parry (1816-1888) lived at Highnam Court, just the other side of the Severn from the city. He studied how Italian painters worked in fresco, devised his own medium for it, and published the recipe in 1862. He built Holy Innocents at Highnam between 1849 and 1851 and painted much of the inside himself. In Gloucester Cathedral, the walls and ceiling of St Andrew’s Chapel in the south transept are his, the restoration completed in 1868. And at Highnam he gathered early Italian pictures: Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco, marble by Mino da Fiesole. His heirs gave the whole collection to the Courtauld in 1966.

Common questions

How long before I could hold a conversation?

It depends what you will settle for. Two or three months of steady work will get you ordering, asking, booking, saying who you are and following the reply when the other person is patient. That is a real conversation, if a short one. The kind where you stop translating in your head and simply talk takes most adults a year or two of weekly lessons, with some effort in between. I would rather tell you that now than at week six. The consolation is that it improves in steps you can feel, not in one long grey stretch.

What is the homework like?

Small and often. Fifteen or twenty minutes, three or four times between lessons, which does far more than two hours the night before. A language needs visiting rather than cramming. It is usually some listening, a little reading, and something you have to say out loud, because that is the bit that transfers. I do not mark it out of ten and I do not collect it in. If you arrive having done none of it, we get on with the lesson. Life happens, and there is no sense in you dreading the appointment.

Would I be better off in the group course or one to one?

If you are starting from nothing, the group course is usually the better fit. It is the cheaper way in, and hearing other people make the same mistakes you are making is worth a great deal. Beginners often arrive convinced they are uniquely bad at this. Choose one to one, at £30 an hour, if you have a date to work towards, if you already have some Italian from family or school and want the gaps filled, or if a fixed weekly slot is simply impossible. Plenty of people do the course first and carry on one to one afterwards.

Nearby: Cheltenham · Stroud · Gloucestershire · Bristol · Dursley