Italian · Intermediate
Read Annalena Bilsini in Italianwith every sentence explained
Grazia Deledda · 1927
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Annalena Bilsini by Grazia Deledda was first published in 1927. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 51,900 words.
A widow, her sons and an abandoned farm on the Po. One iron-willed mother holds it all together.
At Michaelmas the Bilsini family crosses the pontoon bridge over the Po to start again. At the reins is Annalena, a widow with hands as knotted as any farmer's, leading a cart of furniture, children and animals to the vast, neglected estate they have rented. With her come her sons, a daughter-in-law, two rosy grandchildren and old uncle Dionisio, half-paralysed but full of advice.
The land rewards their strength. But Pietro, the handsome, reckless son serving in the army, is the one crooked branch of the family, the wound his mother still hopes to heal. When he comes home, desire and rivalry begin to stir under the farmhouse roof, around his brother's wife Gina and the lively neighbour girl Isabella.
Written just after Grazia Deledda's Nobel Prize, Annalena Bilsini leaves her native Sardinia for the misty plains of the Po valley: a powerful portrait of a mother and of peasant life.
- Author
- Grazia Deledda
- First published
- 1927
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 51,900 words
How it opens
Per San Michele la famiglia Bilsini cambiò di casa ed anche di terra.
Era una famiglia numerosa: cinque figli maschi, la madre vedova, e uno zio di lei, che, sebbene mezzo paralitico e senza un soldo di suo, poteva dirsene il capo.
Appunto per i consigli dello zio Dionisio, i Bilsini avevano venduto la loro piccola proprietà per prendere in affitto un vasto fondo, già antico feudo gentilizio che, di decadenza in decadenza, acquistato in ultimo a vile prezzo da un fabbricante di scope, veniva da questi concesso a modestissime condizioni annuali: cento dieci lire la biolca, due capponi, quaranta uova d’inverno e un cestino d’uva da tavola d’estate.
Reading Annalena Bilsini in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Italian. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked intermediate: comfortable once everyday Italian feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
