Read Decameron in Italianwith every sentence explained

Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio was first published in 1353. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 284,100 words.

Ten young people flee the plague. To pass the time, they tell a hundred stories.

In 1348 the Black Death sweeps through Florence. Seven young women and three young men decide to escape the dying city and retreat to the villas and gardens of the hills outside. There, for ten days, each of them tells one story a day: tales of love and trickery, of clever wit and wild luck, of greedy friars, unfaithful spouses and lovers who will risk anything.

The stories are funny, bawdy, tender and sometimes tragic. Meet Andreuccio da Perugia, a horse dealer who loses everything in one disastrous night in Naples; Federigo degli Alberighi, who sacrifices his last treasure, a beloved falcon, for the woman he loves; and the endlessly patient Griselda, whose story closes the book.

Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece is the foundation of Italian prose and one of the great books of world literature, inspiring Chaucer, Shakespeare and countless films. The Decameron is still irresistibly alive.

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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Italian book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.