The Italian reading room
L’uovo nero — The Black Egg
Capuana’s fiaba of 1882: a beggar woman’s hen lays a black egg, the Queen hatches it, and the cockerel that comes out cannot be killed, cooked or kept quiet.
How long «L’uovo nero» is, and how hard
| Length in Italian | 1943 running words · 253 sentences · about 8 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 18 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 462 dictionary words, averaging 7.7 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 462 of 462 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 195 — 42%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 4 of 8 by length in the Italian room |
365 of this tale's own 462 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 171 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 «L’uovo nero» in 6 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In Italian | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| The Old Woman and the Hen | La vecchia e la gallina | 25 |
| The Black Egg | L’uovo nero | 20 |
| The Cockerel at Court | Il galletto a Corte | 58 |
| Cock-a-doodle-doo! | Chicchirichì! | 43 |
| The Fairy Morgana | La Fata Morgana | 59 |
| The Young Prince | Il Reuccio | 48 |
How it begins
C’era una volta una vecchia che campava di elemosina, e tutto quello che buscava, lo divideva esattamente: metà lei, metà la sua gallina.
Once upon a time there was an old woman who lived on alms, and everything she scraped together she divided exactly: half for herself, half for her hen.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «L’uovo nero» 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
La piccola vedetta lombarda — 1353 wordsLe arance d’oro — 1794 words Spera di sole — 2115 wordsRanocchino — 2161 words
All eight Italian tales · Luigi Capuana · the shelf, counted · where to start