The Italian reading room
Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino — The Little Florentine Scribe
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.
How long «Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino» is, and how hard
| Length in Italian | 2422 running words · 123 sentences · about 10 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 22 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 658 dictionary words, averaging 19.7 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 658 of 658 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 364 — 55%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 7 of 8 by length in the Italian room |
537 of this tale's own 658 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 234 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 «Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino» in 4 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In Italian | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| The Wrappers | Le fasce | 19 |
| On the Stroke of Twelve | Battute le dodici | 14 |
| Broken Sleep | Il sonno rotto | 44 |
| The White Head | La testa bianca | 46 |
How it begins
Faceva la quarta elementare.
He was in the fourth year of elementary school.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino» 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
Spera di sole — 2115 wordsRanocchino — 2161 words La giara — 3153 words
All eight Italian tales · Edmondo De Amicis · the shelf, counted · where to start