Italian Lessons in Swindon

There is a belief that vocabulary is the bottleneck: learn enough words and the language will follow. A thousand words in no particular order will buy you a shopping list, not a conversation. Conversations run on a small set of structures used with confidence, and adults are unusually good at structures, because they already know how a sentence in their own language holds together. Twenty years of teaching has made me stubborn about that. I am Laura Geraci, born in Catania, and I would rather you left the first month able to say six things properly than forty things badly.

One-to-one lessons are £30 an hour on Microsoft Teams. Swindon is near enough that meeting in person can sometimes be arranged — worth asking rather than assuming. Beginners can also learn online in a small group; register your interest for the next one. For what it is worth on paper: QTS, a PGCE, a Cambridge CELTA, and years of exam classes including the International Baccalaureate. What that means in practice is that I have already met whatever it is you are quietly worried about. Ring 07786 107293 and ask.

The Swindon learners I tend to meet

Swindon was built around a timetable — the railway works, the shifts, the trains still running out to Bristol and Paddington — and that habit shows in the people who learn here. They want a fixed slot and they hold on to it, which is exactly the temperament a language rewards. Some are fitting Italian around a commute; others are retired from one and finally have their evenings free. It also means the lesson has to earn its place in the week, which is a good discipline for a teacher. The A419 puts me about an hour off, should in-person ever come up.

“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 →

A priest in Park Lane: Swindon’s quieter Italian record

If you go looking for Swindon’s Italian past, you will not find the ice-cream dynasties that Wales and Scotland can point to. What you will find is quieter and, I think, more interesting. The Victoria County History records that after 1965 the Italian community in Swindon had a priest of its own, living at the Italian Centre in Park Lane, noted alongside Holy Rood among the town’s Catholic congregations.

The wartime record is sharper. On 10 June 1940, the day Italy declared war, a telegram reached the Wiltshire police ordering the internment of every Italian man in the county. In Chippenham that meant Andrea Cavaciuti, who had come to Britain in 1934 and opened an ice-cream shop at 25 The Causeway before taking on the Waverley at 62 Market Place. He was held at Douglas on the Isle of Man and not released until 20 April 1941. Later the county filled with Italians of a different kind. Camp 621 at Ogbourne Maizey, near Marlborough, held Italian prisoners from August 1944 to March 1946, and they worked the farms, planted stands of trees and laid the village’s piped water supply. A police memo of 1945 counted roughly 955 Italian co-operators across the district.

Swindon’s twin towns are Salzgitter, Ocotal and Toruń. Not one Italian city among them. The connection here was made by individual people, and it still is.

Common questions

What does it cost, and how does paying work?

One-to-one is £30 an hour. A small-group beginners’ course works out a good deal cheaper per hour, because you are sharing the time with other people; ask me for the price. Payment is by bank transfer: the course before it starts, individual lessons in whatever pattern suits you — week by week, or a block at a time if that is tidier. I send the details once we have agreed a slot, not before.

You are Sicilian. Will I end up with a Sicilian accent?

I teach standard Italian, which is what serves you in Rome, in Milan, and on the phone to a hotel. Sicilian is a separate language rather than a strong accent, and I am not going to slip it into your lessons by stealth. What Catania does give you is a teacher who can explain why the south sounds so different when you meet it — the vowels, the speed, the words that are not in your dictionary — so that a holiday conversation does not knock you sideways.

What actually happens in the first lesson?

Mostly talking, and a good deal of it in English. I want to know why you want Italian — a wedding, a grandmother, a house, an exam — because that decides where we start and what we can safely leave until later. Then about twenty minutes of real Italian, said out loud by you, so the first time you hear your own voice doing it is with me rather than in a restaurant. Bring a notebook. Buy nothing in advance.

Nearby: Cirencester · Oxford · Bath · Bristol