Read Il mio cadavere in Italianwith every sentence explained

Il mio cadavere by Francesco Mastriani was first published in 1852. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under horror, mystery and crime and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 79,400 words.

A deathbed promise. A forbidden passion. A millionaire terrified of his own corpse.

Naples, 1826. Daniele de' Rimini was found as a starving little boy, abandoned in the forests of Calabria and raised by a poor customs guard as one of his own children. Now he is an elegant, ambitious music teacher who is ashamed of where he comes from. At his benefactor's deathbed, Daniele swears to marry gentle Lucia, the girl who has loved him since childhood. But his heart belongs to someone else: Emma, the proud and beautiful daughter of a duke.

Then a mysterious foreign millionaire who looks strangely like him enters his life. The man is haunted day and night by one fear, of waking up inside his own coffin, and he offers Daniele his entire fortune, on one chilling condition.

Francesco Mastriani's dark Neapolitan bestseller of 1852 is often called the first Italian giallo: a gripping tale of ambition, guilt and terror.

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.