Read Io cerco moglie! in Italianwith every sentence explained

Io cerco moglie! by Alfredo Panzini was first published in 1920. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 46,800 words.

Rich, healthy and perfectly organised. Cavalier Ginetto Sconer needs just one more thing: a wife.

Ginetto Sconer is a self-made Milan businessman who sells soaps, perfumes and a miracle tonic he has invented, vitalina. He weighs eighty kilos, plans to live to ninety-nine and keeps his moral accounts as neatly as his ledgers. What he lacks is an heir: a son with his nose, his eyes and his balanced, serene heart.

So he goes shopping for a bride with the same method he uses in business. He draws up a list of eligible young ladies and crosses them off one by one, for an obese father, too much schooling or too much giggling. His friend Lionello, a fashionable novelist, mocks him and suggests a film diva; the ageless old Maioli sends him to the provinces to meet a poor but dazzling young countess.

A bestseller in its day, Alfredo Panzini's comic novel pokes fun at money, love and the new manners of post-war Italy.

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.