Read Mastro-don Gesualdo in Italianwith every sentence explained

Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga was first published in 1889. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 109,100 words.

He was born a bricklayer. He made himself rich. But money cannot buy him a place to belong.

Gesualdo Motta started out hauling stones with his own hands. Now, through endless work, shrewd deals and sleepless nights, he owns land, mills and contracts across his small Sicilian town. Yet the townspeople mock him with a nickname that says it all: mastro, the workman, and don, the gentleman, at the same time.

To climb higher, Gesualdo marries Bianca Trao, the gentle daughter of a proud but ruined noble family. The match brings him a name, but not respect: the nobles despise him as an upstart, his own relatives resent his wealth, and his heart finds little warmth at home.

Giovanni Verga's second great novel is a powerful portrait of ambition and loneliness in nineteenth-century Sicily. Mastro-don Gesualdo shows, with sharp realism, what a man gains and what he loses when he lives for property.

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.