Understanding every word is out of the question, but if you learn Italian in the kitchen, speaking soon becomes as easy as eating.

Italian is a lovely language, but it can be deceptive, because you get the impression you can understand it even when you don't speak the language. People who only know a few words tend to think themselves quite advanced. Everything sounds so pleasant, and even in restaurants communication takes place almost without a hitch. I order "un mezzo litro di vino bianco e una bottiglia d'acqua minerale" and actually get wine and water. So they do understand me! Only those who already speak Italian quite well know how poor they still are.

Now you might be satisfied with managing to order water and wine, but undoubtedly there is more to life than this, especially in Italy. To capture all that in the local idiom, you have to do something about it. You could, for example, travel to Florence in November and learn Italian while it's raining outside. And what's more, to kill two birds with one stone, you could even do Italian cookery at the same time. Grammar is best learnt in a school, speaking in everyday life, which in Italy consists mainly of cooking and eating, as everyone knows. That is, if you believe the innumerable stories and books about Tuscany. At the Centro Koinè (ancient Greek for "the common language") you can certainly train both your mind and your palate.

A few hundred metres from the market of Sant'Ambrogio, on the second floor of the Palazzo Borghese in the old centre of Florence, teacher Vally explains: "The world of the subjunctive is highly interesting and creates an impression of great elegance!" The way to mastery involves a series of hurdles. In order to reply appropriately, it is an advantage to have a general notion of your interlocutor's meaning. You need not necessarily understand every word. The young Florentine lady's name is not, as she readily admits, so very Italian: "It's taken from a generally lesser-known opera"-yet we Germans are still quite familiar with Alfredo Catalani's "La Wally" under the name of "Geierwally" (novel by Wilhelmine von Hillera, 1875). Now Vally says: "Capire tutto non esiste!" We should think of it as an exercise for the ears. To loosen things up, she gets us to start by saying what we don't like about Florence. To the majority, the weather appears most worthy of criticism. Two young Korean ladies complain that the town is not modern and the streets far too narrow.

Vally advises us to simply open our ears as wide as "Dumbo the elephant's" and, with a little imagination, grasp at the general idea of the sentence. I have a feeling that with prepositions, a general idea may not be sufficient. They just have to be learnt. And the same unfortunately goes for vocabulary. A particularly mean trick is that 'warm' is called "caldo" in Italian. I didn't know that when I went to the pizza-bar and insisted that my pizza should under no circumstances be served "caldo". This caused some surprise on the part of others and, a little later, also on my part. After the morning with Vally it certainly won't happen again.

It's the lunch break now and we're approaching the pleasant part of the daily syllabus. At the nearby wine-merchant's, "Enoteca de' Giraldi", our group, consisting of three Japanese, three Americans and two Germans, are listening to the course with the lovely name of "Pane, Vino e Lingua". Again, Vally sits at the narrow end of a long, wooden table and announces: "Today we're going to have a little chat about white wines." A charming understatement, because Vally is in fact a trained sommelier. She did the three-year training-course without any gastronomic ambitions, purely for the purpose of teaching her pupils something about wines.

As the afternoon course does not stipulate knowledge of Italian, two interpreters are present to translate into Japanese and English. "Spicy, aromatic dishes require just as long an aftertaste as wine," they are just saying, which is why one should generally use spices sparingly. Vally speaks of the deplorable habit of seasoning salad dressing with lemon. The only thing you can drink with that is water, she says. Any wine would immediately take on the taste of lemon. "Then you'd be drinking lemonade!"

Later, at the wine-tasting session, Helmut, a retired teacher from Hanover, falls in love with a '97 Vermentino. He professes himself quite sure you can drink it without eating. "Perhaps not the whole bottle, but definitely a glass or two," corrects Vally. But Helmut has already poured himself another glass.

The after-effects of all the different Tuscan white wines we subsequently tasted are revealed to us the following morning. However, Vally's teaching methods are eminently suitable for loosening our heavy tongues. In a sort of guessing-game, we are to predict the course of a narrative on the basis of a series of pictures. First, we see a man lying on a bed. Then an open window, and a vase lying on the ground with a puddle next to it. "The man's asleep and a gust of wind has knocked the vase over," hazards Helmut in German. I nod in agreement and Vally immediately insists I repeat it in Italian. Luckily, I remember Puccini's famous aria "Nessun dorma!" from Turandot. "Il signore dorma, un vento arrive, la vasa rotto," I stammer. Not bad, but alas! Wrong: In the last picture it becomes clear that the puddle on the floor is a pool of blood. Now there is even a man with dark glasses and a gun looking through the window. Scenes from everyday Italian life, we should have guessed!

Language is also a question of psychology. You don't really have to know it; you just have to get talking. Personally, I always find verbal incompetence somewhat embarrassing. I suppose I feel it's really rather inconsiderate to importune a native speaker with broken stuttering. The kitchen, on the other hand, is an appropriate place to speak Italian. "Oggi facciamo la pasta all'uovo," says teacher Elisabetta. For every new word, she shows us the matching item: "pasta" consists of "farina" (flour), "uova" (eggs) and "sale" (salt). The rolling pin is called a "matterello" and for cooking you need a lot of "acqua bollente". The hissing of the olive oil in which we are frying the garlic and onions mercifully masks incorrect intonation.

Helmut shines, hand-turning the pasta machine. ("It must taste better like this!") I attack the mincemeat ragout. ("Should the meat be brown or black?") When the noodles are "al dente", everybody sits down expectantly round the table. Regrettably, my ragout still needs quite a while, and when at last it's ready, the noodles are cold. We eat it, anyway. The Japanese ladies, who work in a pizzeria in Tokyo, object that their recollection of the recipe is quite different. Helmut comments: "The only tragedy is that there's too little Parmesan cheese."

Next day everything is all right again. "Il risotto!" announces Elisabetta, "una cosa tipicamente italiana!" Sweat the shallots until they're transparent, then add pieces of melon, and then gradually add rice and stock. Elisabetta reveals two secrets of a successful risotto: "Only use rice containing very little starch, the Arborio type, for example. And secondly, be patient." Keep adding cup after cup of stock, and keep stirring, simmering, adding broth, and stirring, simmering...When the risotto is ready, we season it to taste with parsley and Parmesan cheese. No objections this time, even Helmut rises to a sigh of contentment.

I can cope quite well with my freshly acquired Italian in the kitchen. But how do I rate in the big wide world? When buying shoes, which I may say is quite a complicated matter in itself, I cause some hilarity in the shop. The actual choosing of the shoes I master in exemplary fashion. You can of course simply point to them. However, a request for warm winter soles is more of a linguistic challenge. "C'è qualcosa da fare dentro contra il tempo?" does not produce the desired effect. The shop assistant smiles kindly-or is she laughing at me? I try again: "Contra la freddura..." which-alas-is wrong again since 'the cold' is generally known as "il freddo". "Qualcosa di caldo per sentirsi meglio" eventually leads to the assistant calling a colleague, who enquires "Solette?" No, they do not sell winter soles. Arrivederci.

The food culture is an important part of everyday Italian cultural life. The time between lunch and dinner is often spent discussing what has been eaten, and what will be eaten. I too, like a good meal, but the need to talk about it afterwards is totally lacking in me. The simple statement that it tasted good betrays the German spoilsport. An Italian would never make a faux pas like that. Anyone who stands at a pasta machine for hours or who dines for hours has earned the right to report back in the same degree of detail later. In fact, it's practically a duty. "What did you have to eat last night?" is a perfectly natural question for language students to ask each other in the corridors of the Centro Koinè, a few days into their course. Those who aren't chatting about food are talking about wines and winegrowers.

Just under an hour's drive from Florence lies a village called Greve. Former bank manager Renzo Pancani, who has, ever since his retirement, dedicated his life exclusively to his estate, welcomes us to his 14th century wine cellar. The whole annual production consists of fully 5000 bottles of a single type of Chianti Classico. The American ladies, whose main reason for coming here was the Italian wine, are visibly delighted, while the pizza-baking ladies from Tokyo mentally assess the space left in their suitcases. Helmut arranges for a case to be sent to him, and I purchase one bottle for the journey, since in a week's time, the course will be over for me.

At home, when it has become clear to me that German rain is even more unfriendly than the Tuscan variety, and that winter, unlike in Florence, no longer retains even a breath of summer, then I shall stand in the kitchen, steaming shallots and chopping up melons. And when I see the Christmas decorations sparkling in the house opposite, but it still hasn't snowed yet and the weather is just cold and miserable, I shall think of plane-trees and little stone walls, of frescos in the Duomo in Florence, of the aroma of fresh olive-oil, and of Signor Pancani's vineyard. I have learnt to cook three pasta-dishes and two risotti and that's enough for weekdays. At the weekend I can always eat out. Maybe I'll even eat Italian.