Italian · Beginner
Read Il sigillo d'amore in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Seal of Love
Grazia Deledda · 1926
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About the book
Il sigillo d'amore by Grazia Deledda was first published in 1926. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked beginner and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 53,400 words.
A treasure under a nomad camp, a crow named Little One, and a doctor who wants to cure love.
Published in 1926, the year Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize, these stories travel from the Sardinia of her childhood, where, she remembers, children practically grew up on horseback, to the streets, staircases and boulevards of Rome. Friars and thieves, newlyweds and lonely widows, shepherd boys and old peasant women all find a place here.
In "Little One" a rich, lonely widow watches her proud servant Fedele care for his pet crow, until she takes in one of her own. In "The Gypsies' Treasure" little Madlen, sick in her tent, hears that her people have dug up a hidden treasure in the caves below their camp. In "The Cure for Love" a new village doctor arrives convinced that love is an illness like any other, with symptoms and a cure.
Short, varied and often funny, The Seal of Love is perfect for bite-sized reading in Deledda's clear, musical Italian.
- Author
- Grazia Deledda
- First published
- 1926
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 53,400 words
How it opens
Aveva appena finito di predicare, il grosso frate barbuto, e se ne tornava al convento, anzi del convento già rasentava il muro dell’orto, di sopra del quale le nuvole bianche dei peri e dei susini in fiore lasciavano cadere una silenziosa nevicata di petali sul marciapiede deserto. Sul marciapiede opposto, di là dalla strada larga dove il sole già caldo sebbene al tramonto e un venticello che sapeva ancora di neve giocavano un loro gioco malizioso e sensuale, solo una donna passava quasi di corsa, agitata, con le mani gesticolanti, le falde della giacca che si aprivano e si chiudevano come due ali nere di sopra e viola di sotto.
Reading Il sigillo d'amore 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 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.
