Read I promessi sposi in Italianwith every sentence explained

I promessi sposi by Alessandro Manzoni was first published in 1827. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance.

Two young people want to marry. A powerful lord has decided they won't.

Lombardy, 1628. On the shores of Lake Como, the silk weaver Renzo and the gentle Lucia are about to be married, until two armed bravoes stop the village priest, Don Abbondio, on his evening walk with a warning: this wedding must not take place. Their master, the arrogant Don Rodrigo, has set his eyes on Lucia, and the timid priest is far too frightened to say no.

Forced to flee their village, the couple are separated and swept into the turbulent history of Spanish-ruled Italy: bread riots in Milan, war, famine and the great plague. Along the way they meet the fearless friar Cristoforo, the mysterious Nun of Monza and a feared lord known only as the Unnamed.

Manzoni's novel shaped the modern Italian language and is still read by every Italian student. This edition opens with a long biographical introduction to the author before the story itself begins.

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.