Native Italian teacher, and the person behind every lesson and every article on this site.
Coming from a small village in the province of Catania, I always felt that my world was too small, almost as if I were living in a bubble and this always made me crave the outside, other cultures and visiting other countries.
I decided to study languages at university and to do some language exchange with people based in Spain to improve my Spanish, as I wanted to teach both Spanish and Italian.
During my university years, I had the chance to teach Spanish to Italian high school students, but after I graduated I moved to Spain where I continued studying Spanish at a Spanish academy and I started teaching Italian to Spanish speakers almost on a daily basis.
When the pandemic started, I was still living in Barcelona and I decided to switch to online individual and small group teaching completely and never went back.
After Spain, I moved to the UK and to the Netherlands, where I taught both online and in person to some students I had online.
These days 95% of my teaching is online to students from all over the world, which has broadened my view on life and my experience. 5% is in person when I go to the UK and Spain and I meet my students. My life has been shaped by these 4 countries, giving me perspective in life and in my work.
Degree in European Languages and Cultures, at the department of humanities in Catania.
More than 6,000 hours taught on my Preply profile, where students leave verified reviews.
Prego is the polite everyday reply to grazie, but it also turns up at a door, at a counter, on the phone and when someone hands you something. A teacher from Catania explains the one thing the word is doing, why Italians say it, and what to say back.
Read the article ↗Sicilian and Italian are two different Romance languages, not a language and its accent. A teacher from Catania who speaks both shows what you actually hear: the vowels, the retroflex dd, real word pairs side by side, and why your family's Italian may have been Sicilian all along.
Read the article ↗Sicilian and Italian both come from Latin, but Sicilian didn't come from Italian. A teacher from Catania explains why the word "dialect" causes so much confusion, what Sicilian actually is, and whether you should learn it.
Read the article ↗There are alternatives to Preply, and they fall into a small number of genuinely different types rather than a list of similar websites. I teach on Preply and independently, so here is what each one is good for and where each one falls short.
Read the article ↗Both are marketplaces where you book one-to-one lessons with a tutor. The real difference is not the lessons, it is how you find, pay for and keep a teacher. I teach on one of them, so here is what that looks like from the inside.
Read the article ↗Book a trial lesson and let's begin with a simple buongiorno. What are you waiting for?