Read Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore in Italianwith every sentence explained

Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore by Luigi Pirandello was first published in 1921. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 18,800 words.

A rehearsal is interrupted. Six strangers walk onto the stage. They are characters, and they want their story told.

A theatre company is rehearsing a new play when a strange family appears from nowhere: a Father, a Mother, a Stepdaughter, a Son and two silent children. They explain that their author created them and then abandoned them, leaving their drama unfinished. Now they beg the bewildered Director to bring it to life.

As the characters begin to act out their painful past, they quarrel over what really happened, mock the actors who try to play them and blur every line between fiction and reality. Who is more real: the people on stage, or the roles they are trapped in?

Luigi Pirandello's play caused a riot at its 1921 premiere and went on to change theatre around the world. Short, bold and endlessly surprising, Six Characters in Search of an Author is a modern classic by a Nobel Prize winner.

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.