Advanced stories
Original Italian stories written for this level, with comprehension questions.
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.