Mastery 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.
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.