Short stories
Original stories in Italian for each level, with comprehension questions. Tap any word to hear it, tap a dotted word to see its meaning, and listen to the whole story read aloud.
Beginner
Short stories
20 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Il caffè di Gennaro
A barista in Naples knows how every customer takes their coffee. Then a new customer arrives.
Al mercato di Ballarò
Salvo takes his German friend Anna to a busy street market in Palermo, where everyone shouts.
Il nuovo vicino
In a Turin apartment building, Signora Rosa wants to know everything about the new young man on her floor.
I tortellini della nonna
Every Sunday in Bologna, Giulia makes tortellini with her grandmother, but her tortellini are never perfect.
Il biglietto del treno
Tom, an English student, takes a regional train to Florence and forgets one small but important thing.
Il gatto della libreria
Every afternoon a grey cat visits a small bookshop in Venice. Nobody knows where it comes from.
Lo zaino sbagliato
In Milan, a boy runs to school and picks up the wrong backpack. Inside there is a big surprise.
Tre gusti di gelato
In Rome on a hot day, Lucia can't choose her ice-cream flavours, and the queue behind her keeps growing.
La bicicletta di Marta
In Ferrara, the city of bicycles, Marta's old bike disappears from outside the library.
Una domenica al mare
A family from Bologna drives to the beach at Rimini, but everyone wants something different.
La festa a sorpresa
In Verona, Luca's friends plan a surprise party for his thirtieth birthday. Keeping it secret is not easy.
In farmacia
Kenji, a Japanese cook working in Genoa, has a bad cold and must explain it to the pharmacist.
La lettera dalla Sardegna
A grandmother in Sardinia doesn't use the internet, so she writes real letters to her grandson in Milan.
L'autobus delle sette
In Bari, Nadia takes the same bus every morning and sees the same people, but she never talks to them.
Il cane che non cammina
In the mountains near Trento, a dog called Bruno stops in the middle of the path and won't move.
Il primo giorno da cameriere
Omar starts work as a waiter in a busy Milan trattoria. He knows the menu, but not the customers.
La festa del paese
Once a year, a tiny village in Umbria fills with music, food and people. This year, Giorgio has an important job.
Un tavolo per due
In Lecce, Francesca books a table at a restaurant for a first date. The date is late, very late.
L'ombrello giallo
It starts to rain in Siena, and a tourist without an umbrella finds help from a stranger in the Piazza del Campo.
La tessera della biblioteca
A retired man in Perugia goes to the library for the first time in fifty years. A lot has changed.
Elementary
Short stories
20 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Il portafoglio sul tram
Valentina loses her wallet on a Rome tram. Getting it back takes a whole day and a lot of help.
Le estati dai nonni
Now a teacher in Turin, Antonio remembers the long summers of his childhood in a small village in Calabria.
Matricola a Padova
Caterina's first week at the University of Padua: a room to share, a lecture hall to find, and a famous old staircase.
La torta salata
In Parma, Davide wants to bake his girlfriend's mother a cake. One small mistake changes everything.
La maratona di Firenze
Fifty-year-old Daniela decides to run her first marathon in Florence. At kilometre thirty, she wants to give up.
Il trasloco
Moving from Milan to Turin should take one day. For Paolo and his three friends, it takes rather longer.
Bloccati dalla neve
A couple driving through the mountains of Abruzzo is stopped by a snowstorm and taken in by a village.
Lo scambio linguistico
In Bologna, an Italian student and an American student meet every week to practise each other's language. They don't always understand each other.
Il negozio di dischi
In an alley in Genoa, an old record shop is about to close for ever. A teenager with a school project changes its story.
In Vespa fino al mare
Two friends from Rome ride an old Vespa to the sea at Sperlonga. Halfway there, it stops in a village where nobody is in a hurry.
La gita a Pompei
On a school trip to Pompeii, a boy who never listens in history class gets separated from his group among the ruins.
In cima all'Etna
Three friends from Catania climb Mount Etna at dawn. The volcano has a surprise for them.
Il mistero del quarto piano
In Trieste, strange noises come every night from the flat upstairs. Irene decides to find out what's going on.
La maschera sbagliata
At the Venice Carnival, two friends in identical masks get mixed up in the crowd, with unexpected results.
L'esame di guida
In Naples, Ciro takes his driving test for the third time. The examiner is strict and the traffic is, well, Neapolitan.
Il cane ritrovato
On Lake Como, a little dog goes missing during a storm. Three days later, a phone call comes from the other side of the lake.
Il treno in ritardo
At Verona station, a train is two hours late. Two strangers waiting on the platform start talking.
La vendemmia
A software engineer from Milan spends a week picking grapes in the Langhe hills of Piedmont. It's harder than he thought.
Il pappagallo del signor Nicola
In Bari's old town, a family agrees to look after a neighbour's parrot for a week. The parrot knows far too many words.
La lettera mai spedita
While renovating an old house in Ortigia, the island at the heart of Syracuse, a young couple finds a love letter from 1962 hidden in a wall.
Intermediate
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
La chiave del nonno
In Bologna, Giulia inherits an old key from her grandfather, and nobody in the family knows what it opens.
Giovannino senza paura
A retelling of an old Italian folk tale about a boy who is afraid of nothing, not even a haunted palace.
Il caffè sospeso
A young barista in Naples tries to discover who is the mysterious customer paying for strangers' coffees every morning.
Il colloquio
In Turin, Matteo is late for the most important job interview of his life because he stops to help a stranger.
Colapesce
A retelling of the Sicilian legend of Cola, the boy who swam like a fish and discovered what holds up the island.
I biglietti sul frigo
In a student flat in Padua, Sara and her flatmate communicate only through notes on the fridge, until one note changes everything.
Il lupo di Gubbio
A retelling of the medieval legend of the friar who made peace between a frightened town in Umbria and a hungry wolf.
Il treno delle 7:12
Every morning on the commuter train from Bergamo to Milan, the same four strangers sit together without ever speaking, until the day one of them is missing.
Le avventure di Giufà
Two retold Sicilian folk tales about Giufà, the foolish boy who sometimes turns out to be the wisest person in the room.
L'orto sul tetto
In a Milan apartment block where neighbours only meet to argue, a retired teacher proposes turning the flat roof into a vegetable garden.
La Befana
A retelling of the old legend of the Befana, the old woman who said no to the Three Kings and has been searching for a child ever since.
Il ritorno a Matera
After forty years in Germany, Vito comes back to Matera and hardly recognises the town he left as a young man.
La lezione di guida
In Cagliari, a nervous father insists on teaching his daughter to drive, and the lessons don't go as he planned.
Re Laurino e il giardino di rose
A retelling of the Dolomite legend that explains why the mountains turn pink at sunset.
Lo sciopero
A train strike in Rome forces two strangers with very different lives to share a taxi, and then a car, all the way to Florence.
Il lago dell'arcobaleno
A retelling of the legend of Lake Carezza in the Dolomites, where a wizard tried to catch a water nymph with a rainbow.
Il cane di nessuno
In the old town of Lecce, a stray dog has many names and many homes, until the council threatens to take him away.
Lo scambio di case
A family from Udine and a family from Lampedusa swap homes for August, and each discovers a very different Italy.
Il ponte del diavolo
A retelling of the Tuscan legend of the strange humpbacked bridge near Lucca, built in one night with the devil's help.
L'esame orale
In Pavia, a shy law student has to face the most feared professor of the faculty in an oral exam, in front of everyone.
Le tre melarance
A retelling of an old Neapolitan fairy tale about a prince who searches for a bride hidden inside a fruit.
La pasticceria di via Etnea
In Catania, a young pastry chef back from London wants to modernise her grandfather's historic shop, and the regular customers are not happy.
Il giorno della bora
A student from Sicily who has just moved to Trieste meets the city's famous wind, and the old neighbour who teaches her how to live with it.
Bertoldo e l'albero
A retelling of an episode from the old Italian tales of Bertoldo, the clever peasant who outwitted a king.
Il matrimonio di mia sorella
A young man from Puglia tells how his sister's wedding nearly turned into a disaster, and why it became the best day of the family's life.
Il munaciello
A couple moves into an old flat in Naples, where things keep disappearing and reappearing, and the neighbours have only one explanation.
La casa a un euro
A couple from Turin buys a ruined house for one euro in a nearly empty village in Irpinia, and discovers the real price of the deal.
Prezzemolina
A retelling of the Italian folk tale of the girl named after parsley, held prisoner by the fairies and set impossible tasks.
La gara del tiramisù
In Treviso, a shy accountant enters a tiramisù competition with her late grandmother's recipe and finds herself up against a famous chef.
La sirena Partenope
A retelling of the ancient legend about the siren whose body, carried by the sea, gave Naples its first name.
L'ultima transumanza
In Abruzzo, a young engineer decides to walk with her father and his sheep on what he says will be his last seasonal migration.
La grotta della Sibilla
A retelling of the legend of the Sibyl's cave in the mountains of the Marche, where a knight spent a year in an enchanted kingdom.
Il quaderno delle ricette
In Modena, two sisters who haven't spoken in years must share their late mother's recipe notebook.
Costantino Fortunato
A retelling of an old Italian tale, written down in sixteenth-century Venice, about a poor boy, a clever cat and a king's daughter.
La contrada
A woman from Milan marries a man from Siena and discovers that, during the Palio, she has married his whole neighbourhood too.
Il pan di Toni
A retelling of one of the Milanese legends about the birth of the panettone, the famous Christmas cake.
L'estate dei bergamotti
A teenager from Bologna is sent to spend the summer on his uncle's farm near Reggio Calabria, and expects the worst holiday of his life.
L'anello del pescatore
A retelling of an old Venetian legend about a stormy night, three mysterious passengers and a ring given to the Doge.
La prima neve ad Aosta
A nurse from Palermo transferred to a hospital in the Aosta Valley sees snow for the first time, and learns that mountains can be warm too.
Le janas
A retelling of a Sardinian legend about the tiny fairies who lived in tombs carved in the rock and wove with threads of gold.
Upper-intermediate
Short stories
16 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
La traduttrice
A court interpreter in Bolzano realises, halfway through a trial, that the words she is translating could ruin an innocent man.
Il silenzio del notaio
In Siena, an elderly notary reads a will that shocks a wealthy family, and keeps a secret that only he and the dead woman knew.
Il ristorante vuoto
During a long winter of empty tables, a trattoria owner in Rome's Testaccio district finds a new reason to keep the kitchen open.
Il custode dei mosaici
In Ravenna, a weary museum guard is asked by a blind visitor to describe the golden mosaics of San Vitale, and sees them properly for the first time in decades.
Il punteggio
In a Turin insurance company, a new software scores every employee's productivity, and the lowest score belongs to the person everyone relies on.
La padrona di casa
A student from Bergamo rents a room in Bari from a strict eighty-year-old widow, and their year together turns out very differently from how it began.
Il campione di briscola
In a village bar near Nuoro, an unbeaten old card player faces a challenger nobody expected: his granddaughter, who learned the game online.
La casa al mare
Three siblings meet in their late parents' summer house on the Ligurian coast to decide whether to sell it, and none of them says what they really want.
Il primo giorno di pensione
In Ancona, a port crane operator who has never missed a day of work wakes up on the first morning of his retirement with nothing to do.
La voce
In Rome, a dubbing actor who has given his voice to a Hollywood star for twenty years is replaced, and has to find out who he is without it.
L'ascensore
Two neighbours in a Milan apartment block, who have been fighting for years through the residents' association, get stuck together in the lift.
Il cantiere dei frammenti
After the 1997 earthquake in Assisi, a young restorer spends years fitting together thousands of fragments of a fresco, and one piece changes her life.
Il figlio del farmacista
In a Calabrian hill town, the pharmacist's son comes home from Milan to sell the family pharmacy, and discovers what it really sells.
Cena con lo sconosciuto
In Bologna, a widowed woman reserves a table for two every Friday at the same trattoria, and one evening a stranger asks if the empty chair is free.
Lo chef e la nonna
A Michelin-starred chef from Parma is challenged on live television to cook a simple dish against an eighty-year-old grandmother, and loses.
L'ultima edizione
In Udine, the editor of a small local newspaper prepares its very last issue, and has to decide what goes on the final front page.
Nonfiction
24 original articles: explainers, news-style pieces, columns and workplace texts, each with a comprehension check.
Elogio del treno regionale
A columnist argues that the slow regional train, with its delays and strangers, teaches us more about Italy than any high-speed line.
Opinion column
I custodi dei paesi vuoti
A report from a mountain village in Molise where the population has fallen from two thousand to ninety, and from the few people who chose to stay.
Reportage
Cinque Terre a novembre
A traveller visits the famous Ligurian villages out of season, when the crowds have gone and the coast shows another face.
Travel writing
Il bar sotto casa
A columnist defends the humble neighbourhood bar as Italy's last true public square, and worries about its slow disappearance.
Opinion column
Venezia e l'acqua alta
A report on how Venetians live with high water, and on the mobile barriers that now protect the city, at a price.
Reportage
La Transiberiana d'Italia
A winter journey on a historic train through the snowy highlands of Abruzzo and Molise, on a line saved from abandonment.
Travel writing
In difesa del dialetto
A columnist who was punished at school for speaking dialect argues that Italy's local languages are a treasure, not a sign of ignorance.
Opinion column
La notte del mercato
A night spent at Milan's wholesale fruit and vegetable market, where the city's food arrives while everyone else is asleep.
Reportage
Palermo, istruzioni per perdersi
A traveller's advice for visiting Palermo: throw away the map, follow your nose and let the city's many layers find you.
Travel writing
Le mani che parlano
A columnist reflects on Italian hand gestures: a joke for foreigners, a source of embarrassment for some Italians, and a language worth taking seriously.
Opinion column
La biblioteca su tre ruote
In the hills of Basilicata, a retired schoolteacher drives a small three-wheeled van full of books to villages that have no library.
Reportage
Lungo il Po in bicicletta
A week cycling along the banks of Italy's longest river, from the plains of Lombardy to the delta, through fog, villages and flat silence.
Travel writing
Il mito del posto fisso
A columnist looks at the Italian dream of the permanent job, why her parents' generation loved it, and why her children's generation may not.
Opinion column
I maestri del corallo
A report from Torre del Greco, near Naples, where the ancient craft of coral and cameo carving is passed down in small workshops.
Reportage
Civita, la città che muore
A visit to Civita di Bagnoregio, the tiny village on a crumbling hill in northern Lazio, reached only by a long footbridge.
Travel writing
Elogio del pranzo della domenica
A columnist defends the long, noisy Italian Sunday lunch against busy schedules, diets and the temptation to skip it.
Opinion column
La scuola più piccola
A report from a primary school in an Alpine valley where seven children of different ages share one classroom and one teacher.
Reportage
Il lago d'Orta
A quiet weekend on the small lake in Piedmont that most travellers miss, with an island of silence in the middle.
Travel writing
Il calcio che ci divide
A columnist who doesn't like football reflects on why, in Italy, it still matters so much, even to people who never watch it.
Opinion column
La città in affitto
A report from the historic centre of Florence, where short-term holiday rentals are pushing out the last residents.
Reportage
La Sicilia barocca
A journey through Noto, Modica and Ragusa, the golden towns of south-eastern Sicily rebuilt after the great earthquake of 1693.
Travel writing
Imparare l'italiano da adulti
An Italian teacher of adult learners explains what her students teach her about her own language, and why mistakes deserve more respect.
Opinion column
Italiani senza cittadinanza
Young people born and raised in Italy to foreign parents talk about growing up Italian in everything but their documents.
Reportage
Sulla via Francigena
Five days on foot along the ancient pilgrims' road through southern Tuscany, from Siena to the edge of Lazio.
Travel writing
Advanced
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
L'ultima notte del faro
On the night a Sardinian lighthouse goes automatic, its old keeper and the young technician sent to replace him find out that the new machine still has a few things to learn.
La sarta di via Po
Turin, 1957: a seamstress who has dressed the city's best families for thirty years is asked to make a wedding dress for the girl who once stole her fiancé's heart, or rather, for her daughter.
Il timbro del pane
In old Matera every family marked its bread with a wooden stamp before taking it to the communal oven; decades later a baker's grandson tries to find out whose stamp has been left in his drawer.
L'ultima corsa del ventinove
A Milan tram driver on his last shift before retirement finds that his regular passengers have organised something, and that one of them has a question he has been avoiding for twenty years.
Lettere da Charleroi
Belgium, 1956: in letters home to his wife in Abruzzo, an Italian coal miner describes the work underground, and what he does not tell her says as much as what he does.
Il correttore di bozze
Florence, 1934: a meticulous proofreader is handed the first novel of a young woman from the countryside, full of "mistakes" that turn out to be the best thing about it.
Il nivarolo
A Palermo grandmother tells her grandson about her father, who gathered winter snow in the Madonie mountains and sold it in summer for sorbets, and then takes the boy to find the old snow pit.
La maestra di Pejo
In 1923 a young teacher from Bari is sent to a mountain village in Trentino where the children answer her in a dialect she cannot understand, and she has to decide who is teaching whom.
Il campanaro di Bevagna
The last bell-ringer of an Umbrian town has one year to teach his art before the bells are electrified, and the only volunteer is a sixteen-year-old girl who plays the drums.
Il testamento di zia Addolorata
In a notary's office in Lecce, a rich old aunt's relatives gather for the reading of her will, which turns out to be a carefully prepared lesson in what each of them really gave her.
I segni sul muro
A grandson tries to persuade his Venetian grandmother to leave her flooded ground-floor flat, until he reads the marks she has been drawing on her kitchen wall for sixty years.
Il ritratto del podestà
In a small town in the Marche in 1936, a penniless painter is commissioned to paint the podestà's official portrait and discovers how dangerous it is to paint a man exactly as he is.
Il ciliegio di confine
Two elderly sisters near Vignola have not spoken for thirty years because of a cherry tree growing exactly on the line between their land; when the tree starts dying, one of them has to cross the line.
Il telegramma
In an Abruzzo village in 1943, the postman carries a telegram from the War Ministry for days without delivering it, until the soldier's mother comes to collect it herself.
Il cappello e la bora
In Trieste, the violent bora wind once blew a young man's hat into the arms of the woman he married; sixty years later, now a widower, he loses his hat again on the same pier.
Il medico condotto
Basilicata, 1952: a young doctor from Turin is posted to a village where nobody trusts him and everybody goes to the old healer instead, until a sick child forces the two of them to work together.
I baffi di don Gennaro
A Neapolitan barber with the most famous moustache in the Sanità district swears to shave it off if Napoli ever win the league, never imagining that, in the spring of 1987, he will have to keep his word.
La bottega di Cremona
A young Japanese woman comes to Cremona to learn violin-making from a taciturn old master, who for months lets her do nothing but scrape and sand wood.
L'ultima processione di Nino
In Trapani the Good Friday procession lasts all night; an old porter who has carried the same sacred group for forty years walks under it for the last time and hands his place to his son.
Quaranta giorni in risaia
In 1951 a seventeen-year-old girl from Emilia leaves home for the first time to weed the rice fields near Vercelli, and recalls, decades later, the forty days that changed her life.
Il tema in bianco
Rome, 1968: at the school-leaving exam, a student hands in an almost blank essay, and the young examiner has to decide whether silence can be an answer.
Il tartufo del re
In the Langhe in 1891, an old truffle hunter and his dog dig up the biggest white truffle anyone has ever seen, and the count who owns the woods wants it as a gift for the king.
Le note a margine
A young woman inherits her uncle's attic library in Bologna and finds, in the margins of hundreds of books, a twenty-year written conversation with an unknown reader.
Le tre zie di Ascoli
Three elderly sisters in Ascoli Piceno each guard one third of their mother's recipe for stuffed fried olives, and their niece has a single Christmas to put the pieces together.
I muretti a secco
After the 2011 flood in the Cinque Terre, an old winegrower who rebuilds dry-stone walls takes on a young Senegalese man as his helper, and each teaches the other how stones stay up.
Le lastre di Agnone
A Canadian woman comes to a hill town in Molise looking for the photograph her great-grandmother sent to a husband she had never met, and the photographer's grandson finds two glass plates instead of one.
Diario di bordo
In 1910 a young Piedmontese farmhand keeps a diary in his best schoolboy Italian on the crossing from Genoa to Buenos Aires, in third class among two thousand emigrants.
Gli angeli del fango
In November 1966, when the Arno floods Florence, a nineteen-year-old student from Rome joins the volunteers saving books from the mud of the National Library, and one damp volume changes the course of her life.
Le elezioni di Roccanera
In a tiny Ligurian hill village where nobody wants to be mayor, the retired postwoman finally agrees to stand, only to discover that her opponent is her own husband.
Il pastore e la lupa
In the Abruzzo mountains, a shepherd who has lost sheep to wolves clashes with a young biologist who follows a radio-collared she-wolf, until a snowstorm puts the three of them on the same side.
La casa cantoniera
On Christmas Eve 1962 a blizzard traps a bus full of strangers on a Dolomite pass, and the road-keeper's family, living in the red house at the top, has to find room and food for everyone.
La lingua del nonno
In Modica, a famous chocolate maker loses his sense of taste after a stroke, and his granddaughter, back from a career in Milan, has to become his tongue.
L'orologio non ritirato
A watchmaker in Como has kept a customer's watch in his drawer for forty-one years, and when he finally decides to find the owner, he discovers why the man never came back.
Lo spettatore della prima fila
In a small puppet theatre in Palermo, the last puppeteer of his family plays every night to almost empty benches, and to one old man who never misses a show and never seems to look at the stage.
La vigna sul vulcano
On the slopes of Etna, an eighty-year-old woman who makes wine from century-old vines refuses to sell her land to a big wine company, even when the volcano itself seems to take the company's side.
I numeri della signora Iole
A Roman tobacconist has watched a widow play the same lottery numbers every week for twenty years; the one week she fails to come, he plays them for her, and they come up.
La maschera dell'Arena
For forty seasons an usher at the Arena di Verona has shown thousands of people to their seats without ever seeing an opera from start to finish, until her colleagues arrange her last night.
Il paese che non c'era
In 1912 a bored military cartographer in Florence slips a village that doesn't exist into a map of the Apennines; forty years later, people start to live there.
Il due giugno di Adele
On 2 June 1946, a farmer's wife in Umbria votes for the first time in her life, in the referendum between monarchy and republic, after her husband has told her exactly how to vote.
Il regionale delle sette e dieci
For years the same handful of commuters have shared a carriage on the early train from Bergamo to Milan without ever exchanging names, until one of them stops turning up.
Mastery
Short stories
40 original stories written for this level, each with a comprehension check.
Il fornaio della peste
A seventeenth-century notary's account, in the style of the period, of a Bergamo baker who fed a quarantined district through the plague of 1630, and of the miracle the notary refused to certify.
Le venti parole di nonna Nunzia
A Milanese grandson goes to Naples to persuade his grandmother to sell her ground-floor home in Forcella; she agrees, on one condition: he must first learn twenty words of Neapolitan.
Il processo di Maddalena
Friuli, 1599: the record of an Inquisition interrogation of a village healer, in which the questions reveal more about the inquisitor's ailments than about her witchcraft.
L'acqua di Calatafimi
In 1910 an old veteran from Bergamo, one of Garibaldi's Thousand, recalls in a letter to his grandson the battle of Calatafimi, a Sicilian girl with a water jug, and what became of the Italy they fought for.
La parte del diavolo
In a Sicilian town near Agrigento, a cobbler who has played the Devil in the Easter mystery play for thirty years finds that the town can no longer tell the man from the role, and asks, at last, to play someone else.
Il gondoliere e la pittrice
Venice, 1891: an English watercolourist hires a gondolier to take her to the picturesque spots, and he insists, in Venetian, on showing her the city she has not come to paint.
Turi della zolfara
Sicily, 1898: a ten-year-old boy is handed over to a pickman in a sulphur mine in exchange for a loan to his family, and learns underground that the hardest man in the pit is not what he seems.
I lunedì del signor Brunner
Trieste, 1912: the diary of a governess in a wealthy merchant's household, who observes with growing irony her employer's weekly resolution to begin a new and better life every Monday.
Er carrettiere de Marino
Rome, 1927: an old wine-carter from the Castelli Romani, who has brought wine to the city's taverns by night with his mule for forty years, is challenged to a race by the first motor lorry on the Via Appia.
La confessione di zia Grazia
In a village of the Barbagia, in Sardinia, at the end of the nineteenth century, an old mother goes to confession in her son's place, to carry a sin that he will not confess himself.
L'archivio delle lettere non spedite
In Mantua there is said to be a municipal archive where citizens may deposit the letters they never had the courage to send; its last archivist receives, one day, a letter addressed to herself.
Il diritto al mugugno
In 1950s Genoa, a young Calabrian apprentice to an old ship's chandler learns about the Genoese sailor's ancient right to grumble, and realises something is wrong on the day his master stops complaining.
L'inverno del quarantaquattro
In the Langhe in the winter of 1944, an old peasant woman who speaks only Piedmontese hides a wounded young partisan from Turin in her hayloft, and outwits a German patrol by pretending not to understand anything at all.
Il lettore dell'osteria
In a 1950s Bologna tavern, an old printer reads the newspaper aloud every morning to customers who cannot read; when his voice gives out, an unexpected reader takes his place.
L'americano di Cerenzia
Calabria, 1925: an emigrant comes home from New York in a fine suit with a gold watch, and the whole village treats him as a rich man, except his old mother, who sees at once what the suit is hiding.
Carteggio di una contessa
In 1763 a witty Milanese countess and a Venetian abbé exchange letters about chocolate, fashionable gallants and the education of women, in an original pastiche of eighteenth-century correspondence.
I due campanili
Two villages in the Romagna countryside have competed for centuries over whose bell tower is taller; when an engineer is called in to measure them once and for all, the result threatens to ruin everything.
Le orecchiette dell'Arco Basso
In the old town of Bari, two elderly women who make pasta in the street take their quarrel over a doorstep to the justice of the peace, a young judge from the North who understands Barese far less than he thinks.
La mosca di messer Nuccio
An original novella in the manner of the fourteenth-century Florentine storytellers, in which a penniless painter takes revenge on a miserly wool merchant by means of a fly that is not there.
Il giornale di bordo della Maria Luigia
1876: the logbook of a sailing ship from Camogli rounding Cape Horn, in which the captain's handwriting gives way, entry by entry, to that of his wife.
Il cameriere del terzo capitolo
A Roman novelist who has abandoned his book receives a visit from one of its minor characters, a waiter who appears on a single page and has come to demand a better fate.
La sciura di via Paolo Sarpi
In Milan's Chinatown, a cantankerous old Milanese widow wages war on the new shops in her street, until she discovers that the young Chinese shopkeeper downstairs speaks better Milanese dialect than she does.
Il brigante e il tenente
Basilicata, 1863: a young Piedmontese lieutenant, sent south to fight brigandage, spends one night guarding a captured brigand, and by dawn is no longer sure which of them is the outlaw.
L'elisir del dottor Falcone
At the great Senigallia fair in 1846, a travelling quack sells a miraculous elixir from his cart, with the help of a sharp-eyed orphan boy who discovers what is really in the bottles.
L'ultimo carnevale della Repubblica
Venice, 1797: an old mask-maker watches the thousand-year Republic dissolve without a fight, and decides what to do with the last mask he will ever make for a Venetian carnival.
Lettere da Ventotene
1940: a schoolteacher exiled to the island of Ventotene by the Fascist regime writes to his wife, knowing every line will be read by the censor, and slowly turns the censor into his most attentive pupil.
L'ultima mattanza
Favignana, 2007: the old rais of the tuna fishery leads what will be the last traditional mattanza, and must decide whether his daughter, who knows every rope of the nets, can take his place.
La filanda di via dei Mulini
Near Como in 1902, a thirteen-year-old girl starts work in a silk mill, plunging her hands into boiling water fourteen hours a day, and recalls, as an old woman, the day the girls stopped the machines.
L'ultima transumanza di zì Minguccio
Autumn 1955: an old Abruzzo shepherd drives his flock on foot for the last time along the ancient grassy drove road to Apulia, with a grandson who would rather take the lorry.
Il cardinale e i maritozzi
Rome, 1752: a cardinal tries to close a baker's shop that tempts the faithful during Lent, and finds himself the target of the anonymous verses hung each night on the talking statue of Pasquino.
Le pietre numerate
After the 1976 earthquake in Friuli, an old stonemason and his granddaughter spend years numbering the fallen stones of their town's cathedral, so that it can be rebuilt exactly as it was.
L'ultima parola del vocabolario
A Turin lexicographer has spent forty years writing a great dictionary of Italian, alone, from A to Z; with only a handful of entries left, he has to decide which word will have the last word.
Il ponte della Maddalena
A fresh retelling, in the voice of an old Tuscan storyteller, of the legend of the Devil's Bridge near Lucca, in which a master builder strikes a bargain with the Devil and a village outwits them both.
Il falsario di Siena
Siena, 1912: a brilliant forger of medieval paintings learns that a genuine fourteenth-century Madonna is about to be sold abroad, and saves it the only way he can: by swearing he painted it himself.
La controra
An English translator working on a dead Apulian novelist's book gets stuck on a single word, "controra", and travels south to ask the writer's widow what it really means.
La villa sul lago d'Orta
1926: a young teacher from Novara is hired to tutor the silent son of a Milanese cotton magnate at his lakeside villa, and discovers that the boy has been talking all along, but only to the gardener, and only in dialect.
L'ultima lezione
Padua, 1958: on the day of his last lecture, an old professor of Latin palaeography puts away his notes and talks to his students about the mistakes, complaints and jokes that medieval copyists left in the margins.
Il pescatore di Chioggia
Chioggia, November 1966: an old fisherman whose son wants to leave the sea for the factories of Porto Marghera takes his painted-sail boat out on the night of the great flood.
Le anime pezzentelle
Naples, the 1950s: in the vast ossuary of the Fontanelle, a widow from the Sanità district adopts an unknown skull, as women there had done for generations, and asks it for news of her son, who has emigrated to Venezuela and stopped writing.
Il diario del fante
1917: a peasant soldier from the Murge keeps a pocket diary through the retreat from Caporetto to the Piave; fifty years later his granddaughter, a history student, reads it for the first time.