Read Una vita in Italianwith every sentence explained

Una vita by Italo Svevo was first published in 1892. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 114,200 words.

A young man from the country. A desk in a big-city bank. A dream of becoming someone.

Alfonso Nitti has left his village and his widowed mother to work as a clerk at the Maller bank in Trieste. The work is dull, his colleagues are petty, and the room he rents from the Lanucci family is cramped and gloomy. Lonely and proud, he reads philosophy at the public library and dreams of writing great books.

Then an invitation opens the doors of the Maller house. There Alfonso meets Annetta, the banker's spirited, ambitious daughter, who longs for literary fame, and her elegant cousin Macario, whose ease and confidence he both envies and admires. Suddenly a world of money, books and elegant evenings seems within reach, and with it the chance to rise far above his station.

Italo Svevo's first novel, published in 1892, opens the trilogy completed by Senilità and Zeno's Conscience, and introduces his great theme: the dreamer who never feels quite at home in his own life.

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.