Italian · Advanced
Read Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis
Ugo Foscolo · 1802
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About the book
Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis by Ugo Foscolo was first published in 1802. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 48,200 words.
His homeland has been sold. His heart belongs to a woman promised to another.
It is 1797. With the Treaty of Campo Formio, Napoleon hands the Republic of Venice over to Austria, and young Jacopo Ortis, a passionate patriot, must flee to escape persecution. He takes refuge in the quiet Euganean Hills near Padua, writing letter after letter to his faithful friend Lorenzo.
There he meets Teresa, gentle and melancholy, and falls deeply in love. But Teresa's father has already promised her to Odoardo, a sensible, wealthy and utterly passionless man. Torn between a country he cannot save and a love he cannot have, Jacopo pours his despair, his anger and his tenderness into his letters, while his restless wandering takes him across Italy.
Ugo Foscolo's epistolary novel, often called the first modern Italian novel, is a cry of youthful passion and political grief. The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis remains a cornerstone of the Italian school canon.
- Author
- Ugo Foscolo
- First published
- 1802
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 48,200 words
How it opens
Da’ colli Euganei, 11 ottobre 1797.
Il sacrificio della patria nostra è consumato: tutto è perduto; e la vita, seppure ne verrà concessa, non ci resterà che per piangere le nostre sciagure e la nostra infamia. Il mio nome è nella lista di proscrizione, lo so; ma vuoi tu ch’io per salvarmi da chi m’opprime mi commetta a chi mi ha tradito? Consola mia madre: vinto dalle sue lagrime le ho ubbidito, e ho lasciato Venezia per evitare le prime persecuzioni, e le più feroci. Or dovrò io abbandonare anche questa mia solitudine antica, dove, senza perdere dagli occhi il mio sciagurato paese, posso ancora sperare qualche giorno di pace?
Reading Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis in Passage
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.
