Italian · Beginner
Read Il vecchio e i fanciulli in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Old Man and the Children
Grazia Deledda · 1928
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About the book
Il vecchio e i fanciulli by Grazia Deledda was first published in 1928. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked beginner and filed under historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 38,100 words.
An old shepherd who needs help. A mysterious boy who seems to come from nowhere.
The war has taken every young man from the Sardinian countryside, and old Ulpiano Melis has searched for months for a servant to help with his flock. Then, at the start of Lent, sixteen-year-old Luca Doneddu turns up at the sheepfold with a sad, strange story: his cattle, his brother, his father and his mother, all lost in a few weeks. Is any of it true? Ulpiano is not sure, but he hires him.
Soon the boy is laughing, playing tricks and listening to the old man's legends, while in the village Ulpiano's house full of women waits for summer and for his other Luca, the bright, restless grandson who studies in the city. And fifteen-year-old Francesca, as wild as a colt, has no patience at all for the new servant.
The Old Man and the Children is a gentle late novel by Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda, full of flocks, legends and Sardinian light.
- Author
- Grazia Deledda
- First published
- 1928
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Young Adult
- Length
- About 38,100 words
How it opens
Da cinque mesi il vecchio proprietario Ulpiano Melis cercava inutilmente un servo per il suo ovile: tutti erano alla guerra, ed i padroni che ancora ne avevano uno, si guardavano bene dal lasciarselo pigliare.
Durante l’inverno, il vecchio Ulpiano aveva fatto tutto da sè, nell’ovile, ma con l'avvicinarsi della buona stagione e lo sgravarsi delle pecore, la cosa diventava sempre più difficile: ed ecco, ai primi di quaresima, come inviato da Dio, si presentò un giovine in cerca di lavoro.
Reading Il vecchio e i fanciulli 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.
