Read Canne al vento in Italianwith every sentence explained

Canne al vento by Grazia Deledda was first published in 1913. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 60,300 words.

A loyal servant. A fallen noble house. A secret hidden among the Sardinian reeds.

For years Efix has worked the last scrap of land left to the Pintor sisters, three proud, penniless noblewomen in the village of Galte. Their old name is all they still own, and Efix serves them with a devotion that is also a penance: he carries a guilt he has never confessed, bound up with the night their father died.

Then news arrives that Giacinto, son of the sister who ran away to the mainland, is coming to live with them. Hope stirs in the crumbling house, but the charming young man brings debts, temptations and trouble, and Efix must decide how much one man can sacrifice for the family he serves.

Written by Grazia Deledda, still the only Italian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Reeds in the Wind is a haunting tale of fate, faith and the wild beauty of Sardinia.

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.