Read Racconti fantastici in Italianwith every sentence explained

Racconti fantastici by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti was first published in 1869. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under fantasy and horror. It runs to about 27,100 words.

A bone that wants to go home. A letter of the alphabet that drives a man mad. A soul trapped in a raspberry.

Iginio Ugo Tarchetti was the wild heart of the Scapigliatura, Milan's rebellious bohemian movement, and these short tales are Italy's answer to Poe and Hoffmann: eerie, ironic and strangely modern.

In "A Dead Man's Bone", the narrator keeps a kneecap from his anatomy days as a paperweight, until a séance brings its owner back to ask for it. "The Letter U" is the manuscript of a madman tormented by a single vowel. In "A Spirit in a Raspberry", a carefree young baron in Calabria eats a piece of fruit and finds himself possessed by someone else. And "The Fatal Ones" asks whether some people are born to bring misfortune on everyone they meet.

Published in 1869, the year of Tarchetti's early death, this collection is a cornerstone of the Italian fantastic, and short enough to read one chilling story at a time.

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.