Read Stella mattutina in Italianwith every sentence explained

Stella mattutina by Ada Negri was first published in 1921. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and young adult. It runs to about 26,100 words.

A porter's lodge in a small Lombard town. A mother at the wool mill. A girl who wants more from life.

Little Dinin lives in the porter's lodge of a noble palazzo with her grandmother, who long ago served a famous opera singer, and her mother Vittoria, a widow who works thirteen hours a day in a wool mill and still comes home singing. At night, pretending to sleep, Dinin listens as her mother reads serial novels aloud; by day, behind a striped curtain, she puts on plays for the rich girls of the house.

As she grows up, poor and proud, she studies to become a teacher, determined never to wear herself out in a factory or end her days in service. School, music and poetry awaken in her a restless, burning hunger for life.

Ada Negri tells the story of her own girlhood in short, luminous chapters. This edition also includes two tales from the same volume, Storia di donna Augusta and Storia di donna Teodosia.

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.