The Italian reading room
La piccola vedetta lombarda — The Little Lombard Lookout
De Amicis’s monthly tale from «Cuore», 1886: in the June of 1859 a Lombard boy climbs an ash tree to look for Austrians, and will not come down.
How long «La piccola vedetta lombarda» is, and how hard
| Length in Italian | 1353 running words · 125 sentences · about 5 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 12 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 430 dictionary words, averaging 10.8 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 430 of 430 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 228 — 53%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 2 of 8 by length in the Italian room |
363 of this tale's own 430 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 181 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 piccola vedetta lombarda» in 4 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In Italian | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| The Boy at the Farmhouse | Il ragazzo del casolare | 37 |
| At the Top of the Tree | In cima all’albero | 28 |
| The Three Whistles | I tre fischi | 27 |
| The Flag | La bandiera | 33 |
How it begins
Nel 1859, durante la guerra per la liberazione della Lombardia, pochi giorni dopo la battaglia di Solferino e San Martino, vinta dai Francesi e dagli Italiani contro gli Austriaci, in una bella mattinata del mese di giugno, un piccolo drappello di cavalleggieri di Saluzzo andava di lento passo, per un sentiero solitario, verso il nemico, esplorando attentamente la campagna.
In 1859, during the war for the liberation of Lombardy, a few days after the battle of Solferino and San Martino, won by the French and the Italians against the Austrians, on a fine June morning, a small troop of light cavalry of Saluzzo was riding at a slow pace along a lonely path towards the enemy, carefully scouting the countryside.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «La piccola vedetta lombarda» 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
Cappuccetto Rosso — 741 words Le arance d’oro — 1794 wordsL’uovo nero — 1943 words
All eight Italian tales · Edmondo De Amicis · the shelf, counted · where to start