Read Ivanhoe; ossia, Il ritorno del crociato in Italianwith every sentence explained

Ivanhoe; ossia, Il ritorno del crociato by Walter Scott was first published in 1819. In Passage you read the full text in Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance.

England, 1194. King Richard is a prisoner abroad, and a disinherited knight is coming home in disguise.

More than a century after the Conquest, Normans and Saxons still despise each other. In his hall at Rotherwood, the proud Saxon Cedric dreams of restoring the old royal line through his beautiful ward, Lady Rowena, and has cast off his own son, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, for following the Norman king Richard the Lionheart on crusade.

While Prince John schemes to seize the throne, a silent pilgrim, the wealthy moneylender Isaac of York and his courageous daughter Rebecca, the swineherd Gurth and the jester Wamba are all drawn to the great tournament at Ashby. There an unknown champion calling himself the Disinherited Knight challenges the fiercest Norman lords, among them the Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert.

Published in 1819, Walter Scott’s adventure, with Robin Hood himself appearing as the archer Locksley, shaped the popular image of the Middle Ages for two centuries.

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.