Italian · Beginner
Read Le novelle della nonna in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: Grandmother's Tales
Emma Perodi · 1893
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Le novelle della nonna by Emma Perodi was first published in 1893. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked beginner and filed under children, fantasy and horror. It runs to about 206,600 words.
A Tuscan farmhouse. A crackling fire. A grandmother who knows a story for every night of the year.
It is Christmas Eve in the Casentino valley, in the hills of Tuscany. While the grown-ups of the big Marcucci family walk through the snow to midnight mass, old Regina sits by the hearth with her grandchildren and her youngest son Cecco, just home from the army, and begins to tell a tale while the chestnuts boil.
Night after night, through the seasons, she tells many more: legends of castles and hermits, devils outwitted by clever peasants, ghosts, enchantresses, dwarfs and werewolves, a skeleton's bride and a red inn where travellers vanish. Around her, the life of the family goes on, with its joys, worries and weddings.
Published in 1893, Emma Perodi's book blends fairy tale, local legend and the shiver of a ghost story. It has been loved and reprinted in Italy ever since.
- Author
- Emma Perodi
- First published
- 1893
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy, Horror
- Length
- About 206,600 words
How it opens
Tutte le campane di Poppi e della valle suonavano a festa in quella notte chiamando i fedeli alla messa di Natale, e pareva che a quell’invito rispondessero le campane di Soci, di Bibbiena, di Maggiona e di tutti i paesi e i castelli eretti sui monti brulli, che s’inalzavano fino all’Eremo di Camaldoli e al Picco della Verna, tanto era lo scampanìo che si udiva da ogni lato.
Reading Le novelle della nonna 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.
