Read L'innocente in Italianwith every sentence explained

L'innocente by Gabriele D'Annunzio was first published in 1892. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under mystery and crime and romance. It runs to about 76,900 words.

He has committed a crime no one will ever suspect. Now he wants to confess.

Tullio Hermil, a refined Roman aristocrat, begins by telling us that he is guilty of something terrible, and that he must finally write the truth. Then he takes us back to the story of his marriage. For years he has betrayed his gentle, devoted wife Giuliana, most recently with the seductive Teresa Raffo, while expecting Giuliana to remain his loyal 'sister' at home.

When Tullio at last tires of his mistress and returns to his wife, longing to win her back, he discovers that Giuliana has changed. She has a secret of her own, and when it comes to light, Tullio's jealousy, pride and selfishness start to lead him toward a dark and terrible decision.

Gabriele D'Annunzio's intense psychological novel was the basis of Luchino Visconti's last film in 1976. Dark and gripping, The Intruder is a fearless portrait of a man who cannot see beyond himself.

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 advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Italian book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.