The Italian reading room
Spera di sole — Sunbeam
Capuana’s fiaba of Tizzoncino, a baker’s daughter black as a coal by day and a sunbeam by night, and the proud young prince who learns to ask her name.
How long «Spera di sole» is, and how hard
| Length in Italian | 2115 running words · 220 sentences · about 8 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 19 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 516 dictionary words, averaging 9.6 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 516 of 516 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 243 — 47%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 5 of 8 by length in the Italian room |
411 of this tale's own 516 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 183 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 «Spera di sole» in 6 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In Italian | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| Little Ember | Tizzoncino | 33 |
| In Prison | In prigione | 35 |
| The Neighbours | Le vicine | 38 |
| The Prince on the Road | Il Reuccio in viaggio | 36 |
| The Wizard and the Bread | Il mago e il pane | 51 |
| Open, Princess | Apri, Reginotta | 27 |
How it begins
C’era una volta una fornaia, che aveva una figliuola nera come un tizzone e brutta più del peccato mortale.
Once upon a time there was a baker-woman who had a daughter as black as a firebrand and uglier than mortal sin.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «Spera di sole» 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
Le arance d’oro — 1794 wordsL’uovo nero — 1943 words Ranocchino — 2161 wordsIl piccolo scrivano fiorentino — 2422 words
All eight Italian tales · Luigi Capuana · the shelf, counted · where to start