Learn Italian for travel, built around your actual itinerary.

The difference between visiting Italy and being let in

You can travel Italy on English. Millions of people do, and they have a perfectly good time in the places built for them. What thirty words of Italian buys you is a different trip: the waiter who stops performing and starts recommending, the shopkeeper who tells you which of the two you actually want, the landlady in Puglia who talks for forty minutes about her village because you asked in her language.

The threshold is far lower than people think. You do not need to be fluent. You need to be willing, and to have enough Italian that willingness gets you somewhere.

Lessons built from your route

A week in Rome and Florence is a different vocabulary from a fortnight driving through Sicily, which is different again from ten days on the Amalfi Coast with a rented apartment and a kitchen. So we start from your itinerary.

• Arrival and moving around. Trains, platform changes, tickets to validate, taxis, the car hire desk, the phrase that gets you a straight answer when a connection is cancelled.
• Eating, properly. Reading a menu and understanding the shape of a meal. Asking what is local. Saying you have an allergy in a way that is taken seriously. Ordering coffee like someone who lives there.
• The small daily transactions. The bakery, the market, the pharmacy, the ticket office, the "we are closed between one and four" problem.
• Talking to people. The three or four questions that reliably start a real conversation, and enough listening practice to survive the answer.
• When it goes wrong. Lost bag, wrong booking, closed road, minor medical. This is the vocabulary nobody studies and everybody eventually needs.

How much time do you need before you go?

With two lessons a week and some daily practice, six to eight weeks is enough for a complete beginner to handle the whole surface of a trip: ordering, asking, buying, greeting, apologising, and understanding the reply often enough to keep going. Three months and you will start having conversations that were not transactions.

If your trip is closer than that, say so. A focused four weeks aimed at your specific itinerary still changes things considerably, and we would rather build that than sell you a course you do not have time for.

Regional Italian, since you are going to a region

Italy's dialects are not accents, they are separate languages with their own literature, and in the south you will hear them constantly. We are not going to teach you Neapolitan in six weeks, but we will prepare your ear for the place you are actually going, and give you the handful of local words that people light up at.