Read Storie allegre in Italianwith every sentence explained

Storie allegre by Carlo Collodi was first published in 1887. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked beginner and filed under children. It runs to about 37,700 words.

A boy who wants a top hat. A little pink monkey who becomes an emperor. A general who is scared of a fox.

A few years after Pinocchio appeared as a book, Carlo Collodi gathered these comic stories for young readers, and they show him at his most playful. Ten-year-old Gigino is so desperate to look like a grown man that he spends his days chasing top hats, starched collars and cigars, with disastrous results. Pipì, the "little pink monkey", leaves the forest, makes friends with a boy named Alfredo, breaks his promises, falls into the pocket of a fearsome bandit and somehow ends up an emperor. And brave Leoncino, commander of his cousins' wooden-rifle army, must prove his courage after running away from the enemy.

There is also a Christmas tale, a carnival prank, a lazy schoolboy turned "little lawyer", and Collodi's own memories of being a mischievous pupil.

Short, lively and full of Tuscan humour, Merry Stories (1887) is a perfect first read in Italian.

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 beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of Italian and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.