Read Ben-Hur: una storia di Cristo in Italianwith every sentence explained

Ben-Hur: una storia di Cristo by Lew Wallace was first published in 1880. In Passage you read the full text in Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction.

Three wise men follow a star across the desert. Years later, a young prince of Jerusalem loses everything in a single moment.

The story opens as a Greek, a Hindu and an Egyptian meet in the Arabian sands and travel together toward Bethlehem. A generation on, in Roman-ruled Judea, Judah Ben-Hur, heir to a rich and noble Jewish house, welcomes home his boyhood friend Messala, only to find that the proud young Roman now despises everything Judah holds dear.

When a loose tile slips from the Ben-Hur roof and strikes the new governor, Valerius Gratus, as he rides past, Judah is accused of attempted murder. His mother and sister disappear, the family palace is sealed and he is dragged off to the galleys, kept alive by a single burning hope: to find them again and see justice done.

Published in 1880, Lew Wallace’s epic became one of the best-selling American novels of its century, and the 1959 film, with its legendary chariot race, won eleven Oscars.

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.