Italian · Intermediate
Read La giara in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Jar (Short Stories for a Year, vol. XI)
Luigi Pirandello · 1928
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About the book
La giara by Luigi Pirandello was first published in 1928. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 55,500 words.
Masked men on a dusty road. A wife back from the dead. An old professor with a very unusual plan.
This volume of Luigi Pirandello's great cycle Short Stories for a Year moves between the sun-baked towns of Sicily and the bustle of Rome, with his trademark mix of comedy, cruelty and compassion.
In "The Capture" the gloomy landowner Guarnotta rides home on his donkey at dusk when three masked men with rifles drag him from the saddle. In "The Dead Woman and the Living One" the sailor Nino Mo sails into Porto Empedocle to find the whole harbour cheering: his first wife Filippa, believed lost at sea three years ago, has come home, and he has since married her sister. In "Think It Over, Giacomino!" seventy-year-old Professor Toti has married a poor young woman so she will inherit his pension, and has even found a job for her young lover.
Several of these stories became plays, above all "Think It Over, Giacomino!", one of Pirandello's first great stage hits.
- Author
- Luigi Pirandello
- First published
- 1928
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 55,500 words
How it opens
Piena anche per gli olivi, quell’annata. Piante massaje, cariche l’anno avanti, avevano raffermato tutte, a dispetto della nebbia che le aveva oppresse sul fiorire.
Lo Zirafa, che ne aveva un bel giro nel suo podere delle Quote a Primosole, prevedendo che le cinque giare vecchie di coccio smaltato che aveva in cantina non sarebbero bastate a contener tutto l’olio della nuova raccolta, ne aveva ordinata a tempo una sesta più capace a Santo Stefano di Camastra, dove si fabbricavano: alta a petto d’uomo, bella panciuta e maestosa, che fosse delle altre cinque la badessa.
Reading La giara 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 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.
