The bookshelfItalian · Language through Literature

The Italian reading room

Eight Italian tales, from Collodi to Pirandello

Language
through
Literature

Collodi to Pirandello Italian IN THE ORIGINAL

One word.
A world opens.

Between the lines

Read Carlo Collodi, Luigi Capuana, Edmondo De Amicis and Luigi Pirandello in Italian, with word meanings and English translations beside you. Meet a king whose golden oranges vanish in the night, a boy who climbs a tree in the middle of a war, a tinker sealed inside the jar he has just mended. Start with a complete free story, and choose where to go next.

Open the Italian room

The eight, shortest first

15,682 words across 1,571 sentences.

Tap any word for its dictionary form and meaning; tap a sentence for the English. «Cappuccetto Rosso» is free, entire, and asks for 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 — €5 a month or €39 a year, and the one subscription opens the Italian tales and the Russian, German, Spanish and French shelves alike.

Shortest first, because that is a fair way to meet them: «Cappuccetto Rosso» is 741 words and reads in a sitting, and «La giara» is 3153. What each one asks of a reader — dictionary words, how many appear only once, words per sentence — is counted at the shelf's ledger.

Four authors, and what that means for a reader

The shelf runs from 1875 to 1909. Its first tale is a translation, and says so: «Cappuccetto Rosso» is Collodi's Italian of Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood. Capuana's four are fairy tales of his own making, from «C’era una volta…» (1882). De Amicis's two are monthly tales from «Cuore» (1886), the diary of a school year. Pirandello's «La giara» (1909) is a comedy of a Sicilian farm.

Counted on the texts, the four do not ask the same thing. Every one of Capuana's tales runs to fewer words a sentence than any other tale on the shelf, and every one of them has a smaller share of words met only once. Each author also brings words nobody else here uses — the last column — which is why the reading order prices every step in new words rather than in length.

The printings

Every text here is modern Italian. Collodi is set from the Florence printing of 1875, Capuana from the Bemporad printing of 1902, «Cuore» from Treves (1889) and «La giara» from Bemporad (1928). Nothing has been simplified or rewritten for learners. What the printings do carry is a handful of older spellings — 22 forms a modern dictionary files differently, such as the grave accent of «perchè» — and the ledger lists every one beside today's spelling. The tales are told in the passato remoto, the past tense of written narrative that a course teaches late, and the room glosses each such form back to its infinitive wherever it stands.

What is on each tale's page

Its length and its English title; how many minutes it takes at a learner's pace; how many dictionary words it uses and how many appear exactly once; its chapters as the room reads them; and where it stands on the shelf. «Cappuccetto Rosso» carries the whole tale, Italian against English, sentence by sentence — and a page of its own for every sentence in it. «Le arance d’oro» carries its free opening scene the same way.

Questions people ask before they start

How many Italian words do you need to read a book? · What level are Capuana's fairy tales in Italian? · Can you learn Italian just by reading? — each answered with this shelf's own numbers rather than a round figure.

The other rooms

The same reader stands in four other rooms of the same house. They hold the Russian classics — Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky — German tales from Grimm and Hebel, Quiroga's «Cuentos de la selva» and Perrault and Daudet in French.

Some complete works are free without an account in the interactive reader; other books offer free openings. Free lesson samples are also available. A free account keeps your saved words and progress across devices. Free reading and membership.