Read La novellaja fiorentina in Italianwith every sentence explained

La novellaja fiorentina by Vittorio Imbriani is a public-domain classic. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under children and fantasy.

Ogres, fairies, talking birds and clever girls, told just the way Florence's grandmothers told them.

Around 1870, Vittorio Imbriani sat with old women, nurses and grandmothers in and around Florence and took down their fairy tales as they spoke, keeping every exclamation, aside and joke. The result is a lively collection of some fifty stories, including seven sent to him by his friend Gherardo Nerucci.

Here you meet Prezzemolina, a girl claimed by the fairies after her mother steals parsley from their garden; Zelinda, a Tuscan Beauty who asks her father for a single rose; a Florentine Cinderella; and, in "Le tre melarance", a prince who never smiles and must go in search of the beauty of the three oranges. Kings, ogres and poor peasants all speak in the same quick, cheeky voice.

Imbriani dedicated the book to two young friends, Marta and Gigina, and added notes comparing the tales with Basile, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Italo Calvino later drew on it for his famous Italian Folktales.

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.