Read I racconti delle fate in Italianwith every sentence explained

I racconti delle fate by Charles Perrault was first published in 1876. In Passage you read the full text in the Italian translation by Carlo Collodi, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 80,800 words.

A wolf in grandmother's bed. A cat in boots. A glass slipper left on the stairs.

Before he created Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi was asked to bring the great French fairy tales to Italian children. The result, published in 1876, is this lively collection: Charles Perrault's timeless stories, joined by a few tales from Madame d'Aulnoy and Madame Leprince de Beaumont.

Here are Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Bluebeard and Tom Thumb, told in Collodi's warm, playful and wonderfully clear Italian. Ogres and fairies, clever youngest sons and wicked stepsisters, enchanted castles and forbidden doors: every story is short, surprising and complete.

These are the versions that generations of Italians grew up with, and the book that turned Collodi into a children's writer. For learners, familiar plots make it the perfect first step into reading Italian.

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.