The Italian reading room
La giara — The Oil Jar
Pirandello’s novella of 1909: don Lollò Zirafa’s great new jar is found broken, and Zi’ Dima the mender seals himself inside it with his miraculous putty.
How long «La giara» is, and how hard
| Length in Italian | 3153 running words · 309 sentences · about 13 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 29 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 813 dictionary words, averaging 10.2 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 813 of 813 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 458 — 56%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 8 of 8 by length in the Italian room |
656 of this tale's own 813 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 269 carry 80%. Hold those and the reading is close work rather than decoding. Italian drops a vowel before another and marks the place with an apostrophe, and these counts split a word there, the way the room does when you tap it: «l’» and «d’» are words of their own here.
Its chapters
The room reads «La giara» in 6 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In Italian | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| Don Lollò | Don Lollò | 17 |
| The Broken Jar | La giara rotta | 43 |
| Zi’ Dima | Zi’ Dima | 40 |
| Inside the Jar | Dentro la giara | 59 |
| The Lawyer | L’avvocato | 75 |
| In the Cool | Al fresco | 75 |
How it begins
Piena anche per gli olivi, quell’annata.
A full one for the olives too, that year.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «La giara» is part of the library — the eight Italian tales and the Russian, German, Spanish and French shelves, every word glossed, sentence-by-sentence English — for €5 a month or €39 a year, cancel whenever you like, one subscription for every room. What the library costs. «Cappuccetto Rosso» is free, entire, if you would rather read the room before you buy it, and the opening scene of «Le arance d’oro» after it.
Shorter and longer in the same room
Ranocchino — 2161 wordsIl piccolo scrivano fiorentino — 2422 words
All eight Italian tales · Luigi Pirandello · the shelf, counted · where to start