Read Senso in Italianwith every sentence explained

Senso by Camillo Boito was first published in 1883. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 58,400 words.

Secret diaries, guilty consciences and passions that refuse to behave.

Camillo Boito's Senso gathers eight elegant, unsettling tales of love and obsession in nineteenth-century Italy. His characters are proud, restless and often not very nice, and Boito lets them reveal themselves with cool, ironic precision.

In the title story, the beautiful Countess Livia opens her secret notebook and remembers the summer of 1865, when, newly married to a much older count, she arrived in Venice under Austrian rule and fell for Remigio Ruz, a handsome Austrian lieutenant. What follows is a dark tale of desire, war and wounded pride. In Macchia grigia, a man writes to his eye doctor about a grey spot that haunts his vision, and the memory of Teresa, a passionate young woman of the mountains around Lake Idro.

The title story inspired Luchino Visconti's celebrated 1954 film Senso and the later Senso '45. Sharp, modern and surprisingly daring, this collection is a hidden gem.

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.