The Italian reading room
Luigi Capuana
Born in Mineo, in Sicily, in 1839; died in Catania in 1915. A novelist and critic, and with Giovanni Verga the chief voice of Italian verismo, he also wrote fairy tales: «C’era una volta…», first printed in 1882, tales in the manner of the ones told aloud in Sicily but of his own invention. The room holds four of them.
Fairy tales make a kind first text: short scenes, a king, a queen, a Reuccio and a Reginotta meeting the same few troubles, and a vocabulary that comes back — 38% of the dictionary words in these four appear in more than one of them, against 24% across De Amicis's two.
The four tales
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences | Words a sentence | Words met once |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Le arance d’oro first scene free | The Golden Oranges | 1794 | 227 | 7.9 | 45% |
| L’uovo nero | The Black Egg | 1943 | 253 | 7.7 | 42% |
| Spera di sole | Sunbeam | 2115 | 220 | 9.6 | 47% |
| Ranocchino | Little Frog | 2161 | 266 | 8.1 | 48% |
What the four ask of a reader
8,013 running words across 966 sentences, drawn from 1,113 distinct dictionary words — more than half of the 2,015 on the whole Italian shelf. 572 of them appear in no other author's tale here, and 541 are shared with at least one of the other three.
Short sentences, and words that come back
His sentences are the shortest on the shelf: between 7.7 and 9.6 words each, tale by tale, and every one of the four runs shorter than any tale by the other three authors. And his words come back: in each of these tales between 42% and 48% of the dictionary words appear exactly once, a smaller share than in any other tale on the shelf. A word met once is a word you will not keep; a word met again in the next scene is one you may.
«C’era una volta»
The book is named for the fairy tale's opening words, and the tales keep the promise: 3 of these four have «C’era una volta» — once upon a time — in their first paragraph. Each tale's own page prints how it begins.
Cheaper as they go
The room prices a tale in new dictionary words: the ones it asks that the tales before it did not. In the order the room reads them, Capuana's cost 284, 213, 209, 168 — each one cheaper than the one before, and the last, «Ranocchino», is the cheapest step on the whole shelf. That is what a shared world is worth. The reading order sets out every step.
The past tense the tales are told in
A course teaches «è andato» long before it teaches «andò»; a fairy tale is told in the second. Counting only forms that can be nothing else — «fu», «furono», «ebbe», «ebbero», and the «-ò» of verbs in «-are» — these four tales have at least 179, about 22.3 in every thousand words. The commonest on the shelf are «andò», «tornò», «gridò», «domandò». Every one is glossed back to its infinitive where it stands, so a reader meets the tense in use rather than in a table.
Reading him in the original
Every word is glossed where it stands — dictionary form and meaning, without leaving the sentence — and an English line sits under each sentence, out of your eyeline until you ask for it. The opening scene of «Le arance d’oro» is free and needs no account; the tales themselves are part of the library at €5 a month or €39 a year, one subscription for every room in the house. «Cappuccetto Rosso», the free tale the room begins with, is the usual step before them.
A note on the printing
The text is set from the Bemporad printing of 1902, which is modern Italian. What it carries from its century is a handful of older spellings — the grave accent of «perchè» where a dictionary now sets the acute — and the ledger lists every such form beside today's spelling.
All eight Italian tales · Carlo Collodi · Edmondo De Amicis · Luigi Pirandello · the shelf, counted