Italian · Advanced
Read Vita dei campi in Italianwith every sentence explained
English title: Life in the Fields
Giovanni Verga · 1880
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About the book
Vita dei campi by Giovanni Verga was first published in 1880. In Passage you read the full text in the original Italian, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 38,500 words.
Jealousy, hunger and pride under the hard Sicilian sun.
In these short, intense stories, Giovanni Verga turns his gaze to the shepherds, miners and peasants of rural Sicily, letting their own voices tell their lives. Passions run high, honour is everything, and fate is rarely kind.
In Cavalleria rusticana, a young soldier comes home to find his sweetheart married to another man, and a village love triangle ends in a duel. Rosso Malpelo follows a red-haired boy working in a sand quarry, scorned by everyone because of his hair. In La Lupa, a hungry, fearless woman sets the whole village whispering when she falls for a young farmhand.
The collection that launched Italian verismo is a staple of Italian schools, and its title story inspired Mascagni's famous opera. Life in the Fields is short, vivid and unforgettable.
- Author
- Giovanni Verga
- First published
- 1880
- Language
- Italian
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 38,500 words
How it opens
Una volta, mentre il treno passava vicino ad Aci-Trezza, voi, affacciandovi allo sportello del vagone, esclamaste: «Vorrei starci un mese laggiù!»
Noi vi ritornammo, e vi passammo non un mese, ma quarantott’ore; i terrazzani che spalancavano gli occhi vedendo i vostri grossi bauli avranno creduto che ci sareste rimasta un par d’anni. La mattina del terzo giorno, stanca di vedere eternamente del verde e dell’azzurro, e di contare i carri che passavano per via, eravate alla stazione, e gingillandovi impaziente colla catenella della vostra boccettina da odore, allungavate il collo per scorgere un convoglio che non spuntava mai.
Reading Vita dei campi 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.
