The Italian reading room
Carlo Collodi
Born in Florence in 1826; died there in 1890. Carlo Collodi is the pen name of Carlo Lorenzini, known the world over for «Le avventure di Pinocchio». Before that book he put a volume of French fairy tales into Italian — «I racconti delle fate», printed in Florence in 1875 — and the room holds one tale from it. Pinocchio itself is not on this shelf.
A translation, said plainly
«Cappuccetto Rosso» is Charles Perrault's «Le petit Chaperon rouge» in Collodi's Italian. The story is the Frenchman's; the sentences are the Florentine's. For a learner that is no drawback: it is a tale whose every turn is already known, in the Italian of the author of Pinocchio. The French room holds Charles Perrault's own.
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences | Dictionary words | Words a sentence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cappuccetto Rosso free | Little Red Riding Hood | 741 | 48 | 226 | 15.4 |
What it asks of a reader
741 running words in 48 sentences, drawn from 226 distinct dictionary words. It is the shortest tale on the shelf, and the first the room reads: it asks 224 dictionary words, every one of them new to a reader starting here. Of its 226 words, 172 are met again in the other three authors' tales and 54 are not.
Short is not the same as easy, and the numbers say so. Collodi's sentences run to 15.4 words each, against 8.3 across Capuana's four fairy tales. The tale is free and the story is one you know, which is why the room begins with it; if a sentence feels long, that is the sentence and not you.
A Florentine's Italian
4 of the tale's dictionary words carry the room's «Tuscan» tag — the words and turns a Florentine wrote and a modern textbook does not teach. These are they, with the room's own glosses:
| Word | The room's gloss |
|---|---|
| baloccare | baloccarsi — to dawdle, to amuse oneself (Tuscan) (v.) |
| gli | to him; the (m. pl. article before a vowel or s + consonant); gli è — it is (Tuscan) (pron.) |
| sdigiunare | sdigiunarsi — to break one’s fast, to eat at last (Tuscan) (v.) |
| stiacciata | flatbread, focaccia (Tuscan) (n., f.) |
The past tense it is told in
A course teaches «è andato» long before it teaches «andò». A tale does it the other way round: the narration moves in the passato remoto. Counting only forms that can be nothing else — the auxiliaries' «fu», «furono», «ebbe», «ebbero», and the «-ò» of verbs in «-are» — the tale has at least 18 of them, about 24.3 in every thousand words. Each is glossed back to its infinitive where it stands.
Reading him in Italian
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. «Cappuccetto Rosso» is free, entire, and needs no account, and the opening scene of «Le arance d’oro» comes free after it; the rest of the shelf is part of the library at €5 a month or €39 a year, one subscription for every room in the house.
A note on the printing
The text is set from the Florence printing of 1875, which is modern Italian: nothing in it needs an older spelling to be read. The transcription's typewriter quotation marks and apostrophes are set here as the guillemets and the typographic apostrophe Italian printing uses, and nothing else is changed. Where a word is printed in a form a modern dictionary files differently, today's spelling is given beside it — the ledger lists all 22 such forms on the shelf.
All eight Italian tales · Luigi Capuana · Edmondo De Amicis · Luigi Pirandello · the shelf, counted