Read Il turno in Italianwith every sentence explained

Il turno by Luigi Pirandello was first published in 1902. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 28,300 words.

A rich old suitor of seventy-two. A pretty bride-to-be. A young man told to wait for his turn.

In a small Sicilian town, Marcantonio Ravì has made up his mind: his lovely daughter Stellina will marry Don Diego Alcozèr. Don Diego is rich, he is seventy-two, and he already has four weddings behind him. "Let's reason!" Ravì tells everyone who laughs at him. The old man cannot last long, Stellina will be left a wealthy young widow, and then she can marry whomever she pleases.

Someone like Pepè Alletto, a "golden boy" with fine manners, a good family name and no job, who would gladly marry Stellina himself. Ravì's advice to him is simple: be patient, your turn will come. But Pepè has a thunderous brother-in-law, the lawyer Ciro Coppa, and in Pirandello's world nothing goes according to plan.

Written in 1895 and published in 1902, The Turn is a short, sparkling comic novel in which the young Pirandello is already playing with the absurd logic of everyday life.

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.