The brilliance of language lessons in Italy’s most misunderstood city

It’s 8.30am on a Monday morning and Naples has a hangover. In the narrow, grimy streets of the historic quarter the bins are overflowing, the shops are shuttered and the sun has yet to find its way into the gloom. I’m due to start an Italian language course, and it’s an unnerving welcome. If someone wanted to rob me, this would be the perfect place and time.

Minutes later, my fear turns to embarrassment for momentarily believing the cliche about this city. The street is slowly coming to life – the local bar fills up with people, bins are moved and emptied, and there’s a hopeful glimpse of sun. It all feels normal, ordinary and safe. I find the address I’m looking for, and climb a winding staircase to Italianopoli Italian language school, where co-founder Vivian Ocampo greets me with an enthusiastic “buongiorno” and a smile.

The gritty old town lanways.Credit: iStock

Italianopoli offers compact class sizes – a maximum of six – and a personalised approach. After weathering the pandemic with online lessons, it’s busy again with face-to-face classes for students from all corners of the world. In my class there’s a German woman whose passion for Italian was sparked by a love affair, an American Jesuit priest about to take up a position in Rome, and a young Japanese student obsessed with soccer (he’s come to the right city).

Ocampo and her co-founder husband Dario Montarino are natural teachers – enthusiastic, patient, and expert at making difficult concepts seem simple, calibrating their speech to suit each student. They also make every lesson fun.

This trip isn’t just about the study; my plan has always been to stay in one Italian city for long enough to really get to know it, and Naples is an ideal home base. Beautiful, chaotic, lively and blessed with more than 4000 years of civilisation, it’s a city that’s worth discovering. Dark streets and dirty bins be damned.

Montarino is a native Napoletano, and his love for the city infuses every lesson. More than learning the correct use of pronomi indiretti and congiuntivo passato, he wants his students to leave Naples understanding a little of its soul, knowing how to speak and behave like a local.

Italianopoli classes contain a maximum of six students.Credit: Italianopoli

“Neapolitans can spot a stranger at 50 metres,” he says. A “stranger” in this context is anyone not from Naples – including other Italians. I’m momentarily disappointed that no one will ever mistake me for a Napolitana.

“If you want to show you are interested in the conversation, you have to react, interrupt, talk loudly and quickly, use your hands, be expressive,” Montarino says.

“If you’re not enthusiastically interrupting, then you’re not really interested,” he adds, while demonstrating various gestures of appreciation and disgust. This includes how to hiss at a black cat. We try it out in class, but talking, gesticulating and being expressive is hard.

At least once a week, the school organises an optional social gathering for students, such as a dinner or a guided walk through one of the city’s neighbourhoods. On one afternoon, Ocampo and Montarino take a group of us for a stroll through Vomero, a hip hilltop suburb reached by funicular and famed for its winding tree-lined streets, boutiques, restaurants and wine bars.

It’s a great opportunity to practise Italian and explore the city. As we walk and talk, interrupting each other as we go, Montarino shares his local knowledge on architecture, rubbish collection, gardening, graffiti, art, and the personality of the city and its people.

Students at the Santa Chiara cloister next to the school.Credit: Italianopoli

On the path back down into the old quarter, we observe rich, poor and everything in between, living, working and playing next to each other. “That’s the spirit of Naples,” he says.

On the morning of my last class and last day in Italy, I head to pasticceria Giovanni Scaturchio. I love watching the staff at work while I drink my coffee at the bar. Usually I’m quiet, but today, confident enough in my Italian to make a short speech, I thank the staff and wish them well. They look momentarily surprised, then conversation erupts. Where do I come from? How long am I staying? What do I think of Naples? The questions come thick and fast, and it takes another 10 minutes to just say goodbye. I laugh as they praise my Italian. It’s bravissima, meravigliosa, superba, they say.

In the docu-drama Napoli Magica, which premiered in Italy last year, actor Marco D’Amore chats to the city’s locals and asks them why Naples is so special. “It’s because you can never be lonely here,” says one older woman. Now that I can have a conversation in Italian, I know exactly what she means.

THE DETAILS

Italianopoli’s five-day, small-group, intensive courses cost €200 ($330), operating Monday to Friday, 9am-1pm; individual lessons from €25 ($40) an hour. Visit the website for more course options. See italianopoli.com

The writer travelled at her own expense.