Italian Lessons in Liverpool

The Arandora Star left Liverpool on the last day of June 1940 with hundreds of Italian men aboard, most of them arrested a fortnight earlier in the cities where they had spent their working lives. A torpedo found her two days out. Hundreds drowned. Some of the families who went on living in the city stopped using Italian at home after that, and a language put down on purpose has a long tail: it surfaces two generations later as a grandchild who can hear the tone of a sentence but not the words in it. That is one of the commonest sorts of learner I get. It can be picked back up.

Two ways in. One to one is £30 an hour, arranged to fit whatever your week actually looks like — some people want a fixed hour every Tuesday for years, others want six lessons before a particular trip and then stop, which is sensible and I never argue with it. Or there is a beginners’ group, and you can register your interest for the next one. Small group, everyone starting from nothing, which is a far more comfortable place to begin than people imagine. It all runs on Microsoft Teams. The number is 07786 107293.

What Liverpool students usually want

If yours is one of the Liverpool families with an Italian branch, you may already be carrying a few words without knowing quite where they came from — a greeting, a dish, something a grandfather said when he was cross. They tend to be southern words, which suits me: Catania is far enough down that Rome sounds northern to me. Lessons run over Teams, so the evening costs you the hour and nothing else. No bus into town in the rain, no car park at the far end of it. You shut the laptop and you are already home.

“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 →

Gerard Street, the Pier Head, and the surnames that stayed behind

Liverpool’s Little Italy sat in a tight run of streets off Scotland Road: Gerard Street, Hunter Street, Circus Street, Christian Street, Clare Street. Most of the families in them had come from Atina and Picinisco, mountain villages in the country between Rome and Naples, with a smaller northern group from around Como and Lucca. The 1881 census found close to a third of the city’s Italians earning a living as musicians and street entertainers. Twenty years on the work had changed, and the 1901 census recorded over 130 men laying mosaic and terrazzo, some of which you can still walk across on William Brown Street. Then came the ice cream. The Chiappe, Capaldi, Fusco, Podesta, Santangeli and Valerio families started with handcarts and ended up as names half the city knew.

Two things broke the quarter apart. The Arandora Star sailed out of Liverpool carrying interned Italian civilians and was torpedoed 75 miles north-west of Donegal on 2 July 1940; roughly 865 people aboard died. A bronze plaque to those who sailed from Liverpool and never returned was unveiled at the Pier Head on the sixty-eighth anniversary, in 2008. Then in the 1960s the tenements around Scotland Road came down and the families were rehoused on the edges of the city. The community scattered but the surnames did not, and that is very often the reason someone from Liverpool first emails me.

Common questions

What does a typical week look like between one lesson and the next?

A lesson usually starts with whatever we did last time, said out loud again, because the second telling is when it sticks. Then one new thing — a tense, a set of words, a way of asking for something — and we use it until it stops feeling like a rule. Between lessons I set about ten minutes a day rather than an hour on Sunday night. Ten minutes daily beats an hour in a panic, every time. Written notes come from me afterwards, so nothing depends on how fast you can scribble.

What happens if I miss a week?

Life happens. Nobody has ever got through a run of lessons with every one of them going to plan. A one-to-one hour can be moved if you tell me in advance, and a text is enough. On the course the group carries on, but I send you what we covered and the exercises that went with it, and the first ten minutes of the following week are a recap anyway — as much for the people who were there as for the one who wasn’t.

Do I need to buy a textbook or anything before I start?

No. I write the material and send it, so there is no book to order and nothing to print unless you want it on paper. What you need is Microsoft Teams, which is free and will run in a browser if you would rather not install anything, and somewhere reasonably quiet to sit. A paper notebook helps more than people expect — writing a word by hand seems to file it somewhere that typing does not — but that is a biro and a pad, not an expense.

Nearby: Manchester · Leeds