Italian · Intermediate
Read Il Corsaro Nero in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Black Corsair
Emilio Salgari · 1898
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About the book
Il Corsaro Nero by Emilio Salgari was first published in 1898. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction, thriller and suspense and young adult. It runs to about 98,900 words.
A nobleman dressed in black. A brother hanged by his enemy. A vow of revenge across the Caribbean.
One dark night on the Caribbean Sea, a black pirate ship stops a small boat carrying two exhausted buccaneers who have just escaped from Maracaibo. They bring terrible news: the Red Corsair has been hanged in Maracaibo by the Spanish governor, the Flemish duke Wan Guld, and his body left on the gallows.
The ship's captain is the Black Corsair, Emilio di Roccanera, an Italian nobleman who has sworn to destroy Wan Guld, the man who has already taken two of his brothers. That same night he slips into the enemy city to bring his brother's body home. It is the first move in a war of vengeance, until love crosses his path in the most dangerous way.
Salgari's dark, romantic pirate epic of 1898 is his most famous novel after Sandokan, adapted many times for film and television.
- Author
- Emilio Salgari
- First published
- 1898
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Thriller and Suspense, Young Adult
- Length
- About 98,900 words
How it opens
Una voce robusta, che aveva una specie di vibrazione metallica, s’alzò dal mare ed echeggiò fra le tenebre, lanciando queste parole minacciose:
— Uomini del canotto! Alt! o vi mando a picco!...
La piccola imbarcazione, montata da due soli uomini, che avanzava faticosamente sui flutti color inchiostro, fuggendo l’alta sponda che si delineava confusamente sulla linea dell’orizzonte, come se da quella parte temesse un grave pericolo, s’era bruscamente arrestata.
Reading Il Corsaro Nero in Passage
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.
