Read Mimì Bluette, fiore del mio giardino in Italianwith every sentence explained

Mimì Bluette, fiore del mio giardino by Guido da Verona was first published in 1916. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under romance. It runs to about 73,200 words.

From a painter's model in Venice to the queen of the Paris night.

On paper her name is Cecilia Malespano, a beautiful Italian girl whose vain, scheming mother steers her toward rich admirers. Then a painter uses her as the model for a great canvas at the Venice Exhibition and gives the picture a name borrowed from a Parisian story: Mimì Bluette. The name sticks, and so does the scandal.

Pulled along by Max, a charming and dangerous man who lives off her, Mimì lands in Paris, in the smoky bars and cabarets of Montmartre. There she discovers that she can dance, and soon all of Paris wants to see her. But fame, money and admirers cannot fill her heart, until she meets Hilaire Castillo, a weathered, secretive adventurer whose past nobody knows.

Guido da Verona was Italy's best-selling novelist of the 1910s, and this glamorous, daring romance was his greatest hit, filmed in 1976 with Monica Vitti.

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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday Italian 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.