Read Uno, nessuno e centomila in Italianwith every sentence explained

Uno, nessuno e centomila by Luigi Pirandello was first published in 1926. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 45,700 words.

It all starts with a nose.

One morning, as Vitangelo Moscarda studies himself in the mirror, his wife Dida casually remarks that his nose tilts slightly to the right. He had never noticed. The tiny comment sends him spinning: if he cannot see even his own face as others see it, then who is he, really?

Moscarda begins to suspect that everyone he knows carries a different Moscarda in their head: one for his wife, one for his friends, one for the townspeople who see him as a moneylender's son. A hundred thousand versions of himself, and not one that is truly his. Determined to break free of them all, he sets out to do things nobody would ever expect of him.

Luigi Pirandello's last novel is a witty, dizzying journey into identity by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Six Characters in Search of an Author. One, No One and One Hundred Thousand remains a favourite in Italian schools.

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.