Italian books to read at B1 and B2: short classics in order of difficulty

10 November 2026

Twelve classics in Italian for intermediate learners, from fairy tales to the novel every Italian reads at school, in the order we would read them. All are in the public domain, and three are free to read on Lexico with a translation one tap away.

Italian literature has a reputation for being hard on learners, mostly because of two books: Dante and Manzoni. Leave them for later. Between about 1880 and 1920, Italian writers produced a great many short, clear stories, and those are the place to start.

The levels are our estimates of what you need when a translation is within reach. Without any help, add half a level.

The list

"Free libraries" means Liber Liber, Wikisource or Project Gutenberg. Our guide to where to get ebooks legally explains how to download from each.

Start here: stories you half know

A story you already know is the easiest thing to read in a new language, because you are never lost.

C'era una volta... is a collection of fairy tales by Luigi Capuana, with kings, ogres and clever youngest daughters. Fairy tales repeat their phrases, which is exactly what a learner needs.

Le avventure di Pinocchio is not the film. The original is sharper and funnier, and it comes in 36 chapters of two or three pages each, so it suits short daily sessions. Collodi was Tuscan and uses some Tuscan words and old forms, which is the only real difficulty.

Il fantasma di Canterville is Oscar Wilde's comic ghost story in Italian: an American family buys an English castle, ghost included, and refuses to be frightened. A translation is often easier than an original of the same period, and this one is a good first long story.

Short stories for adults

Capuana also wrote for adults. Un carattere is told mostly in dialogue: Renzo comes back to find his fiancée ill in bed, and a secret between them that her parents know nothing about. Dialogue means short sentences and everyday words. Fausto Bragia, about a poor music teacher who becomes the lover of a rich woman, is a step harder.

Pirandello wrote more than two hundred short stories and collected them as Novelle per un anno. Start with La giara, a comedy about a huge oil jar, the man who mends it and the owner who will not pay. Then try Il treno ha fischiato and Ciàula scopre la luna. They are short and strange, and the Italian is close to today's.

Verga's Vita dei campi contains three of the most famous stories in the language: Rosso Malpelo, La lupa and Cavalleria rusticana. They are set among Sicilian peasants and miners, and Verga bends his Italian towards the way his characters speak. The stories are short, but they need attention.

Novels

Cuore is the diary of a schoolboy in Turin over one school year. Each entry is a page or two, and the language is plain because the narrator is a child. It is sentimental and very much of its time, and generations of Italians grew up on it.

Le tigri di Mompracem introduces Sandokan, the pirate prince of Malaysia. Salgari wrote adventure at full speed. Expect ships, weapons and jungle plants in the vocabulary, and a plot that does not pause.

Canne al vento is set in Sardinia, where three sisters of a ruined noble family live with their old servant Efix. Deledda won the Nobel Prize in 1926. Her descriptions of the landscape are beautiful and demanding.

La coscienza di Zeno and I promessi sposi are here so that you know where they stand. Zeno's account of his attempts to stop smoking is one of the great comic novels of the century, and it is long. Manzoni's story of two lovers kept apart in seventeenth-century Lombardy is the book every Italian studies at school. Both are for C1. Read them when the rest of this list feels comfortable.

The one thing you need to know first: the passato remoto

Italian stories are told in the passato remoto. In much of Italy people rarely use it in conversation, so many courses leave it until late. On the page it is everywhere: disse where you expect ha detto, andò for è andato.

You only need to recognise it. The regular forms are clear enough: parlò, credé, finì. The irregular ones hide the verb, so learn these by sight:

Older books also use egli and ella for lui and lei, and join prepositions in ways that have gone out of use, such as pel for per il and colla for con la. In Lexico, tapping a verb gives its tense and its dictionary form, so the passato remoto stops being a puzzle after the first chapter.

What about modern books?

The modern novels people recommend to learners are still in copyright, and Italian stores sell most ebooks with copy protection. If you find one without it, you can convert your own copy to read the same way as the classics above. The guide to legal ebooks explains what to look for on the product page.

How to use the list

• Read one short story before any novel. Finishing something matters more than what it is.
• Stay with one author for a while. A writer repeats their own vocabulary, so the second Capuana story is easier than the first.
• Test a book on its first page. If you follow the gist with fewer than half the sentences translated, it fits. If not, move up the list and come back.
• Guess before you check. The method is in how to read your way into a language.

The whole Italian shelf, with the opening of each book as the app shows it, is at Italian books with English translation.