Read Tre croci in Italianwith every sentence explained

Tre croci by Federigo Tozzi was first published in 1920. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and mystery and crime. It runs to about 28,400 words.

Three brothers. One bookshop in Siena. A forged signature that could ruin them all.

Giulio, Niccolò and Enrico Gambi have inherited their father's bookshop in Siena, but trade has dwindled year after year, and so has their money. Giulio, the melancholy one and the only one who likes to work, has found a way to stay afloat: for three years he has been forging the signature of their kind friend, Cavalier Orazio Nicchioli, on bills of exchange, which he renews at the bank with a straight face.

Big, noisy Niccolò, who deals in antiques, curses and jokes about prison; surly Enrico, the bookbinder, would rather not think about it. They all live together with Niccolò's wife Modesta and two orphaned nieces, and every evening Nicchioli drops by the shop to chat, suspecting nothing. But the bills keep falling due, and the fear grows heavier every day.

Three Crosses is Federigo Tozzi's masterpiece, published in the year of his death: a dark, compassionate novel of guilt and human weakness.

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.