Read Pasquale Paoli in Italianwith every sentence explained

Pasquale Paoli by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi is a public-domain classic. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction.

An English gentleman goes looking for a hero, and finds an island ready to fight for its freedom.

It is pouring with rain when James Boswell, a curious, snuff-taking English gentleman, rattles into Livorno determined to reach Corsica and meet its famous leader, Pasquale Paoli. A proud, silent Corsican with a reddish dog, the fiery Franciscan Father Bernardino da Casacconi, who once defied his Genoese jailers from the pillory, and the talkative patriot Altobello soon draw him into a world of secret crossings and fierce loyalties.

Corsica has fought Genoa for its independence for decades. Now Genoa has signed the island away to France, and Paoli must prepare his mountain people for a far mightier enemy. Through Boswell's wide eyes we meet the general, his brother Clemente and the men who would rather die than kneel.

Guerrazzi, a firebrand of the Italian Risorgimento, published Pasquale Paoli in 1860, while Italy itself was fighting to become one free nation.

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.