Read Capitan Tempesta in Italianwith every sentence explained

Capitan Tempesta by Emilio Salgari was first published in 1905. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction, romance and young adult. It runs to about 85,000 words.

The bravest swordsman in a besieged city has a secret: she is a woman.

It is 1570, and the Venetian fortress of Famagusta, on the island of Cyprus, is surrounded by the vast Ottoman army. Among its defenders fights a young captain admired by every soldier for his daring blade: Capitan Tempesta. No one suspects that behind the armour hides Eleonora, Duchess of Eboli, a Neapolitan noblewoman who has come to war for love.

Her fiancé, the Viscount Le Hussière, has been taken prisoner by the Turks, and Eleonora will risk anything to find him. With her loyal Arab servant El-Kadur at her side, she must face cannon fire, treachery and the most feared warrior in the enemy camp, the Lion of Damascus.

From Emilio Salgari, the master of Italian adventure, Captain Storm is a fast, romantic swashbuckler with one of the boldest heroines of its age, later brought to the screen.

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.