Read Ciuffettino in Italianwith every sentence explained

Ciuffettino by Yambo was first published in 1902. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 36,300 words.

As tall as a basil plant. A tuft of hair like a feather duster. Trouble in every pocket.

In the sleepy seaside village of Cocciapelata lives Ciuffettino, the only son of a poor cobbler and his doting wife. He is tiny, grubby, lazy and very proud of the enormous tuft of hair that gives him his nickname. School is not for him, and after one prank too many he runs away from home.

That is when the adventures begin. Lost in the woods at night, Ciuffettino is stuffed into a sack by a werewolf and carried off to an ogress's hut. He tricks his way out, stumbles into a city of pompous scholars, rescues an old dog called Melampo, falls into the clutches of a puppeteer who wants to turn him into a puppet, and ends up at sea with a gruff captain.

Written in 1902 by the illustrator and writer Yambo, Ciuffettino is a funny, fast-paced fairy tale in the spirit of Pinocchio, reprinted for over a century.

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.