Italian · Intermediate
Read Il fu Mattia Pascal in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Late Mattia Pascal
Luigi Pirandello · 1904
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Il fu Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello was first published in 1904. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 76,000 words.
What would you do if the world believed you were dead?
Mattia Pascal's life in the small Ligurian town of Miragno is a disaster. His family fortune has been swindled away, his marriage is miserable, his mother-in-law despises him, and he spends his days in a library no one ever visits. One day he simply runs away.
In Monte Carlo, luck smiles on him at the roulette table, and he wins a fortune. On the train home he opens a newspaper and reads something incredible: a drowned body has been found back in Miragno, and his family has identified it as Mattia Pascal. He is officially dead, and free. He invents a new name and a new life. But can a man really live without an identity?
Luigi Pirandello's darkly comic 1904 novel is a modern classic about who we are and who others say we are. It is a staple of Italian schools, written by a future Nobel Prize winner.
- Author
- Luigi Pirandello
- First published
- 1904
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 76,000 words
How it opens
Una delle poche cose, anzi forse la sola ch’io sapessi di certo era questa: che mi chiamavo Mattia Pascal. E me ne approfittavo. Ogni qual volta qualcuno de’ miei amici o conoscenti dimostrava d’aver perduto il senno fino al punto di venire da me per qualche consiglio o suggerimento, mi stringevo nelle spalle, socchiudevo gli occhi e gli rispondevo:
Reading Il fu Mattia Pascal 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.
