Read Chi vuol fiabe, chi vuole? in Italianwith every sentence explained

Chi vuol fiabe, chi vuole? by Luigi Capuana was first published in 1908. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 48,600 words.

A blind girl who sings of her bad luck. A baby no taller than a hand. Two orphans called Bread and Cheese.

Luigi Capuana, the Sicilian writer who gave Italy its literary fairy tale with "Once Upon a Time...", kept coming back to the magic of storytelling. In this 1908 collection, twelve tales mix kings, dragons and spells with coppersmiths, lupin sellers, charcoal burners and a thrifty working woman nicknamed Comare Formica.

In "The Gardener's Daughter" a girl born blind and lame sits by her father's door singing sad songs about her fate. In "Radichetta" a poor woman gives birth to a boy so tiny that she wraps him in cotton wool and carries him in her apron pocket. In "Bread and Cheese" two nameless little beggars meet on a country road and decide to seek their fortune together, like brothers.

Short, funny and full of surprises, the tales of Who Wants Fairy Tales? have the rhythm of stories told aloud, and their lively, simple Italian is perfect for learners.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Italian and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.