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Il piccolo principe

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

B1–B2Fantasy

A pilot stranded in the desert meets a little prince who has traveled from a tiny planet.

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Fantasy · Friendship and family

A pilot stranded in the desert meets a little prince who has traveled from a tiny planet. Through stories of a beloved rose, peculiar adults, and a wise fox, their friendship opens a gentle reflection on love, loneliness, and the things that give life meaning.

Concrete encounters and repeated dialogue help, while figurative meaning and hypotheticals add depth.

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Source and license

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry — Il piccolo principe. Italian translation: Franco Perini (2016). Source: https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Il_piccolo_principe. Translation licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 under specific Wikimedia permission ticket 2016111410012419; https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Discussione:Il_piccolo_principe. Text-only EPUB prepared by LingoReader; prose unchanged. All source revisions, contributor names, history and licence links retained in EPUB attribution. Cover: Original LingoReader title-cover design.

Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino

Carlo Collodi

B1–B2Fantasy

The wooden puppet Pinocchio longs for adventure but repeatedly falls into trouble through impatience, dishonesty, and misplaced trust.

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Fantasy · Travel and adventure

The wooden puppet Pinocchio longs for adventure but repeatedly falls into trouble through impatience, dishonesty, and misplaced trust. As he wanders away from the loving Geppetto, strange encounters and difficult lessons challenge him to discover what responsibility and becoming a real boy might mean.

Repeated concrete action and direct dialogue help, while older forms and colloquial idioms add difficulty.

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Source and license

Collodi, Carlo — Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino. Complete 36-chapter Pinocchio novel. Eighty-four identified illustrations and captions omitted; literary text retained. Source acknowledgement: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52484. Cover: Project Gutenberg source edition; original source cover retained unchanged.

Favole scelte dalla raccolta dei fratelli Grimm

Jacob Grimm · Wilhelm Grimm

B2–C1Fantasy

This selection of the Brothers Grimm's tales follows children, animals, and travelers through magical encounters and difficult tests.

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Fantasy

This selection of the Brothers Grimm's tales follows children, animals, and travelers through magical encounters and difficult tests. Unexpected helpers and dangerous adversaries reveal the consequences of kindness, courage, pride, and cunning, in stories that can shift quickly from comic wonder to darker lessons.

Familiar repeated plots help, but the translation retains many archaic expressions and sentence forms.

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La Divina Commedia di Dante: Complete

Dante Alighieri

C2Arts and culture

Lost in a dark wood, Dante begins a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise with guides who help him understand what he sees.

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Arts and culture · Fantasy

Lost in a dark wood, Dante begins a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise with guides who help him understand what he sees. Encounters with souls from history and his own world turn the voyage into an exploration of moral choice, love, justice, and spiritual renewal.

Medieval poetic Italian, compressed syntax, and extensive allusion need specialist contextual support beyond modern proficiency.

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I promessi sposi. Opere di Alessando Manzoni, vol. 1

Alessandro Manzoni

C1–C2History

Renzo and Lucia hope to marry in seventeenth-century Lombardy, but a powerful local nobleman sets out to prevent their wedding.

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History · Romance

Renzo and Lucia hope to marry in seventeenth-century Lombardy, but a powerful local nobleman sets out to prevent their wedding. Separated by intimidation and upheaval, they face uncertain journeys through a world of injustice, war, and plague, sustained by courage, loyalty, and faith.

Historical vocabulary, narrative digressions, and older sentence forms demand sustained reading.

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Source and license

Manzoni, Alessandro — I promessi sposi. Opere di Alessando Manzoni, vol. 1. Complete 38-chapter novel and original fictional Introduzione; original novel notes 19–44 retained. Scherillo’s later introductory essay and its notes 1–18, Previati artwork and captions, publisher advertisements and modern transcriber notes omitted. Source acknowledgement: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45334. Cover: Project Gutenberg source edition; original source cover retained unchanged.

Le avventure d'Alice nel paese delle meraviglie

Lewis Carroll

B2–C1Fantasy

Alice follows a hurried White Rabbit down a rabbit hole and enters a world where size, language, and logic keep changing.

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Fantasy · Comedy

Alice follows a hurried White Rabbit down a rabbit hole and enters a world where size, language, and logic keep changing. Talking animals, an eccentric tea party, and the Queen of Hearts turn her search for a way onward into a delightfully bewildering adventure.

Concrete scenes help, while archaic translation choices, wordplay, and verse add difficulty.

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La favorita del Mahdi

Emilio Salgari

B2–C1Travel and adventure

In Sudan during the Mahdist uprising, the officer Abd-el-Kerim's love for Elenka becomes caught in dangerous rivalries and shifting allegiances.

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Travel and adventure · History

In Sudan during the Mahdist uprising, the officer Abd-el-Kerim's love for Elenka becomes caught in dangerous rivalries and shifting allegiances. War, jealousy, and the influence of the Mahdi's favorite turn their personal struggle into an adventure across a landscape of battles, pursuit, and uncertain loyalties.

Adventure scenes use descriptive vocabulary, older forms, and geographically specific terms.

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Beatrice Cenci: Storia del secolo XVI

Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi

C1–C2History

In sixteenth-century Rome, Beatrice Cenci lives under the tyranny of a violent father and seeks a way out of her family's misery.

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History · Friendship and family

In sixteenth-century Rome, Beatrice Cenci lives under the tyranny of a violent father and seeks a way out of her family's misery. Guerrazzi's historical novel follows the pressures surrounding her desperate struggle, raising questions about justice, guilt, and the power granted to those who judge others.

Archaic language and rhetorical legal or religious speech require contextual support.

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Isabella Orsini, duchessa di Bracciano

Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi

C1–C2History

In Renaissance Italy, Isabella Orsini's private attachments place her within a dangerous world of aristocratic honor and jealousy.

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History · Romance

In Renaissance Italy, Isabella Orsini's private attachments place her within a dangerous world of aristocratic honor and jealousy. Love, suspicion, and family power tighten around her, in a historical drama that asks how a woman's choices are judged by those who control her fate.

Historical dialogue and elaborate narration retain archaic forms and formal vocabulary.

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Source and license

Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico — Isabella Orsini, duchessa di Bracciano. Complete historical novel: original 1844 dedication, nine chapters, author’s final moral and 109 historical notes. Numeric page placeholders and modern transcriber note omitted; literary content retained. Source acknowledgement: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38298. Cover: Project Gutenberg source edition; original source cover retained unchanged.

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