Italian · Beginner
Read La danza degli gnomi e altre fiabe in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Dance of the Gnomes and Other Fairy Tales
Guido Gozzano · 1914
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
La danza degli gnomi e altre fiabe by Guido Gozzano was first published in 1914. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 19,500 words.
A girl as light as a feather. Gnomes dancing under the full moon. A prince who can only walk backwards.
Guido Gozzano, one of the best-loved Italian poets of the early 1900s, wrote these fairy tales for the Corriere dei Piccoli, Italy's famous children's magazine. Many open with a playful nonsense rhyme, "when the hens had teeth and the snow fell black...", and unfold with a poet's wit.
Piumadoro, an orphan who helps her grandfather make charcoal in the woods, grows lighter every day until the wind carries her off. Kind Serena is sent by her cruel stepmother through the wood where the gnomes dance on moonlit nights. Spoiled Prince Sansonetto mocks the wrong old woman and finds himself walking backwards like a crayfish. And three brothers inherit a magic purse, a tablecloth that serves up banquets and a cloak that makes you invisible.
Funny, tender and full of wonder, The Dance of the Gnomes and Other Fairy Tales is a joy to read aloud, in simple, musical Italian.
- Author
- Guido Gozzano
- First published
- 1914
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy
- Length
- About 19,500 words
How it opens
Piumadoro era orfana e viveva col nonno nella capanna del bosco. Il nonno era carbonaio ed essa lo aiutava nel raccattar fascine e nel far carbone. La bimba cresceva buona, amata dalle amiche e dalle vecchiette degli altri casolari, e bella, bella come una regina.
Reading La danza degli gnomi e altre fiabe 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.
