Read Il tallone di ferro in Italianwith every sentence explained

Il tallone di ferro by Jack London was first published in 1908. In Passage you read the full text in Italian, marked intermediate and filed under science fiction.

A handful of trusts seize America, and a sheltered young woman joins the resistance.

Avis Cunningham is the daughter of a respected Berkeley professor, raised among comfortable dinners and polite debate. Then her father brings home Ernest Everhard, a former blacksmith turned socialist, who tears the easy certainties of a table of churchmen to pieces. Stung, Avis takes up his challenge to look into the case of Jackson, a mill worker who lost his arm to the machinery and received nothing, and her safe world begins to crack.

Her memoir is presented as a manuscript discovered seven centuries later, with notes by a future historian who knows how the struggle ended. What Avis records is the rise of the Oligarchy, the “Iron Heel” of big business, as it crushes farmers, unions and free speech, and the underground movement that rises to fight it.

Published in 1908, Jack London’s novel is one of the first modern dystopias, and George Orwell read it as an uncanny forecast of fascism.

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.