Italian · Intermediate
Read La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Story of the Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl, and Other Stories
Italo Svevo · 1929
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About the book
La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla by Italo Svevo was first published in 1929. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 49,000 words.
An old man falls in love. An old writer falls for a prank. Svevo's last, wittiest tales.
Trieste, in the third year of the Great War. A wealthy elderly businessman, busy getting richer, writes a quick letter of recommendation for a beautiful twenty-year-old girl who wants a job on the trams. Days later he sees her again, ringing the bell of her speeding tramcar, and an affair begins that makes him wonder about his age, his heart and his conscience.
This volume gathers the late stories Italo Svevo left behind. In Vino generoso, an old man on a strict diet drinks too freely at his niece's wedding and pays for it with a night of feverish dreams. In Una burla riuscita, Mario Samigli, a forgotten writer of nearly sixty, learns that a Viennese publisher wants his novel. Or does he?
Published in 1929, a year after Svevo's death, these stories show the author of Zeno's Conscience at his most ironic, tender and modern.
- Author
- Italo Svevo
- First published
- 1929
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 49,000 words
How it opens
Ci fu un preludio all’avventura del buon vecchio, ma si svolse senza ch’egli quasi l’avvertisse. In un breve istante di riposo dovette ricevere nel suo ufficio una vecchia donna che gli presentava e raccomandava una fanciulla, la propria figlia. Erano state ammesse alla sua presenza in forza di un biglietto di presentazione di un suo amico. Il vecchio strappato ai suoi affari non arrivava a levarseli del tutto dalla mente e guardava intontito il biglietto sforzandosi d’intenderlo presto e presto liberarsi dalla seccatura.
Reading La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla 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.
