Italian Lessons in Oxford

Reading a language and speaking it are two different skills, and the first does not hand you the second. Oxford is full of people who have Latin from school, or a shelf of Italian novels, or a doctorate that needed Italian sources. On the page they are quietly capable. Out loud, the first sentence arrives late and at half speed. That gap is ordinary. It is also the quickest kind to close, because the words are already in there and it is only the mouth that is behind. So most of a lesson with me is spent talking.

For beginners there is an online group; register your interest and I will let you know when the next one is forming. It is deliberately a small group, so the talking is shared out rather than performed by whoever is bravest. One-to-one is the other route: £30 an hour over Microsoft Teams, at whatever weekday hour is genuinely free. My name is Laura Geraci. Catania born, twenty years and more in classrooms, QTS, PGCE, Cambridge CELTA, and a long stretch teaching the International Baccalaureate. If it is easier to talk it through, the number is 07786 107293.

What Oxford students usually want

Oxford is a reading city, and it shows in the people who get in touch. Researchers who need spoken Italian for a fieldwork trip or a conference in Bologna. Students with an oral coming. Retired academics who would like the language to be a pleasure rather than a tool. Evenings suit most of them, once the day’s work is put down. Everything runs on Teams, so the journey to a lesson is the walk from the kitchen to the desk, and the hour stays the hour.

“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 →

Dante societies, a Venetian benefactor, and a camp on Harcourt Hill

Oxford has been arguing about Italian literature for longer than almost anywhere outside Italy. The Oxford Dante Society was founded in 1876 by Edward Moore, Principal of St Edmund Hall, together with Signor de Tivoli, then the Taylorian’s lecturer in Italian, and a few college colleagues. It was the second Dante society anywhere in the world, after the German one, and it is still meeting. In 1919 the university appointed its first Serena Professor of Italian, Cesare Foligno, on a gift from Arthur Serena, a shipbroker and the son of the Venetian patriot Leone Serena. The chair exists today as the Agnelli-Serena Professorship of Italian Studies.

The Italians who actually lived in Oxford came under less comfortable circumstances. Camp 43 at Harcourt Hill, near North Hinksey, opened on farmland in 1942 and held six or seven hundred Italian prisoners of war. After Italy’s surrender in September 1943 many became co-operators, and from August 1944 they were allowed to move within five miles of the camp. They worked farms around Headington and Cowley, dredged the stretch of the Cherwell at the end of Cave Street in St Clement’s, and fitted a kitchen into a flat on Beaumont Street. People remembered the large red patch on the back of their battledress.

In 2019 Oxford added Padua to its list of twin cities, pairing two of the oldest universities in Europe on paper at last.

Common questions

I read Italian fairly comfortably but I can barely say a sentence. Where does that leave me?

Somewhere useful. Reading has already given you vocabulary and a feel for how the grammar behaves, which is the slow part. What is missing is speed and the physical habit of making the sounds, and that returns with use. We spend the lesson in Italian at whatever pace you can manage, and I put your reading to work rather than starting you again from the alphabet.

I get self-conscious speaking a foreign language in front of another person. Will one-to-one make that worse?

Usually the opposite. There is nobody to measure yourself against and no queue waiting for you to finish your sentence. I correct as we go, lightly, and I let plenty of small errors pass on the day so the conversation keeps moving. The first two or three lessons are the stiff ones. After that most people stop noticing they are speaking a second language at all.

How much practice should I be doing between lessons?

Twenty minutes on most days beats two hours on a Sunday. I set something small and specific each week, usually a handful of phrases to use and something to listen to, because listening counts as practice even when it feels passive. If a week goes by and nothing gets done, say so at the start and we adjust. That happens to everyone with a job.

Nearby: London · Swindon · Cheltenham