Read Mare nostrum in Spanishwith every sentence explained

Mare nostrum by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez was first published in 1918. In Passage you read the full text in the original Spanish, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction.

His first love was a six-hundred-year-old empress. His second was the sea.

As a boy in Valencia, Ulises Ferragut is enchanted by the tomb of a medieval empress in his notary father’s favourite church, and by his uncle, an eccentric doctor the coast people call “the Triton,” who fills his head with myths of sea gods and sirens. He grows into a bold, well-read merchant captain, marries, has a son and buys his own steamer, which he renames the Mare nostrum.

Then the First World War breaks out. Freight prices soar, German raiders haunt the shipping lanes, and in Naples Ulises meets Freya, a fascinating and mysterious woman whose secrets will pull him and his ship into the hidden war beneath the waves.

Published in 1918, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s passionate sea novel followed his worldwide hit The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and was filmed in Hollywood by Rex Ingram in 1926.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Spanish. 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 Spanish 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.