The Italian reading room
Edmondo De Amicis
Born in Oneglia in 1846; died in Bordighera in 1908. A soldier before he was a writer, he published «Cuore» in 1886: a schoolboy's diary of one year in a Turin classroom, with a monthly tale set into it as the year goes round. The room holds two of those monthly tales, each read on its own.
| Tale | In English | Words | Sentences | Words a sentence | Dictionary words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| La piccola vedetta lombarda | The Little Lombard Lookout | 1353 | 125 | 10.8 | 430 |
| Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino | The Little Florentine Scribe | 2422 | 123 | 19.7 | 658 |
De Amicis’s monthly tale from «Cuore», 1886: in the June of 1859 a Lombard boy climbs an ash tree to look for Austrians, and will not come down.
De Amicis’s monthly tale from «Cuore»: Giulio copies his father’s addresses by night so the family can eat, and is scolded by day for the sleep it costs him.
Two tales that are not alike
The table says it before any description does: the same author, the same book, and sentences of 10.8 words in one tale and 19.7 in the other. A level letter set on «De Amicis» would have to be wrong about one of them. Nor do the two share a world the way fairy tales do: 24% of the dictionary words in them appear in both, against 38% that come back among Capuana's four.
What he adds, counted
These two run to 3,775 words in 248 sentences, from 879 distinct dictionary words — and 417 of those appear in no other author's tale on this shelf. That is the vocabulary of a cavalry patrol and of a household short of money, which no king or fairy needs.
Where the room reads them
Not side by side. In the room's reading order «La piccola vedetta lombarda» is step 3, asking 251 new dictionary words; «Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino» is step 7, asking 284 new dictionary words. The reading order sets out what stands between them and why.
The past tense, here too
It is not only fairy tales that are told in the passato remoto. Counting only forms that can be nothing else — «fu», «furono», «ebbe», «ebbero», and the «-ò» of verbs in «-are» — these two tales have at least 93, about 24.6 in every thousand words, against 22.3 in Capuana's fairy tales. A learner who knows only «è stato» meets «fu» here as surely as there.
Reading him in the original
Every word is glossed where it stands and an English line sits under each sentence until you ask for it. Both tales are part of the library, at €5 a month or €39 a year, one subscription for every room in the house; each tale's page carries its opening sentence with its English. «Cappuccetto Rosso» is free, entire, and needs no account — the usual first step before these.
A note on the printing
The text is set from the Treves printing of 1889, which is modern Italian. In the book each monthly tale stands inside a diary entry; the room reads the tale on its own, and the diary's date line is not a line of it.
All eight Italian tales · Carlo Collodi · Luigi Capuana · Luigi Pirandello · the shelf, counted