Italian · Advanced
Read Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator
Luigi Pirandello · 1915
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About the book
Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore by Luigi Pirandello was first published in 1915. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 61,800 words.
A man who turns a handle. A camera that swallows life. A tiger waiting in its cage.
Serafino Gubbio is a cameraman at the Kosmograph film company in Rome. All day long he cranks his machine, silent and impassive, while actors weep, rage and kiss in front of the lens. In his private notebooks he writes down what he sees: a world sped up by machines, where people are slowly turning into mechanisms themselves.
At the studio everyone is talking about Varia Nestoroff, a bewitching Russian actress who seems to leave ruin in her wake, and about the real tiger the company has bought for a film. When young Aldo Nuti, who has his own reasons to hate and desire the Nestoroff, turns up at Kosmograph, Serafino senses a drama far more real than anything being shot.
Written when cinema was still silent and new, Shoot! is one of the first great novels about film, and a sharp, haunting meditation by Luigi Pirandello on man and machine.
- Author
- Luigi Pirandello
- First published
- 1915
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 61,800 words
How it opens
Studio la gente nelle sue più ordinarie occupazioni, se mi riesca di scoprire negli altri quello che manca a me per ogni cosa ch’io faccia: la certezza che capiscano ciò che fanno.
In prima, sì, mi sembra che molti l’abbiano, dal modo come tra loro si guardano e si salutano, correndo di qua, di là, dietro alle loro faccende o ai loro capricci. Ma poi, se mi fermo a guardarli un po’ addentro negli occhi con questi miei occhi intenti e silenziosi, ecco che subito s’aombrano. Taluni anzi si smarriscono in una perplessità così inquieta, che se per poco io seguitassi a scrutarli, m’ingiurierebbero o m’aggredirebbero.
Reading Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore 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.
