Italian · Advanced
Read Malombra in Italianwith every sentence explained
Antonio Fogazzaro · 1881
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About the book
Malombra by Antonio Fogazzaro was first published in 1881. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under horror and romance. It runs to about 140,300 words.
A lonely palace on a dark lake. A manuscript hidden for decades. A young woman who believes she has lived before.
Corrado Silla, a struggling young writer, receives a mysterious invitation to the remote lakeside palace of Count Cesare d'Ormengo, an austere old man who seems to know secrets about Silla's own past. In the gloomy rooms of the house lives the count's niece, Marina di Malombra: proud, brilliant, restless and bored to the point of fever.
In a secret cabinet, Marina has found a hidden manuscript and a lock of hair left by Cecilia, an ancestor who was imprisoned in that very palace long ago. As she reads, a terrible idea takes hold of her: that Cecilia's soul lives again in her, and that an old wrong is waiting to be avenged. Silla soon finds himself drawn into her strange, magnetic world.
Antonio Fogazzaro's first novel is the great Italian gothic romance, later filmed by Mario Soldati. Malombra is atmospheric, passionate and full of shadows.
- Author
- Antonio Fogazzaro
- First published
- 1881
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Horror, Romance
- Length
- About 140,300 words
How it opens
Uno dopo l’altro, gli sportelli dei vagoni sono chiusi con impeto; forse, pensa un viaggiatore fantastico, dal ferreo destino che, oramai senza rimedio, porterà via lui e i suoi compagni nelle tenebre. La locomotiva fischia, colpi violenti scoppiano di vagone in vagone sino all’ultimo; il convoglio va lentamente sotto l’ampia tettoia, esce dalla luce dei fanali nell’ombra della notte, dai confusi rumori della grande città nel silenzio delle campagne addormentate; si svolge sbuffando, mostruoso serpente, tra il laberinto delle rotaie, sinchè, trovata la via, precipita per quella ed urla, tutto battiti dal capo alla coda, tutto un tumulto di polsi viventi.
Reading Malombra 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.
