Italian · Advanced
Read Le confessioni d'un italiano in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: Confessions of an Italian
Ippolito Nievo · 1867
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About the book
Le confessioni d'un italiano by Ippolito Nievo was first published in 1867. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 333,400 words.
Born a Venetian, he will die an Italian. This is the story of everything in between.
At the age of eighty, Carlo Altoviti looks back on his long life. It begins in the vast, smoky kitchen of the castle of Fratta, in Friuli, where he grows up as a poor, overlooked relative of the noble family, at the very end of the old Venetian Republic.
There he meets his cousin, the Pisana: beautiful, capricious, generous and impossible, the great love of his life. As Napoleon's armies sweep away the old world, Carlo is carried from the castle into revolutions, wars, exile and hope, always pulled back toward the Pisana and toward the dream of a free, united Italy.
Written by Ippolito Nievo, who fought with Garibaldi and died in a shipwreck at just twenty-nine, Confessions of an Italian is the great novel of the Risorgimento: vast, funny, romantic and full of life. Its opening chapters at Fratta are among the most beloved pages in Italian literature.
- Author
- Ippolito Nievo
- First published
- 1867
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 333,400 words
How it opens
Io nacqui veneziano ai 18 ottobre del 1775, giorno dell’Evangelista Luca; e morrò per la grazia di Dio italiano quando lo vorrà quella Provvidenza che governa misteriosamente il mondo.
Ecco la morale della mia vita. E siccome questa morale non fui io ma i tempi che l’hanno fatta, così mi venne in mente, che descrivere ingenuamente quest’azione dei tempi sopra la vita d’un uomo potesse recare qualche utilità a coloro, che da altri tempi son destinati a sentire le conseguenze meno imperfette di quei primi influssi attuati.
Reading Le confessioni d'un italiano 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 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.
