What should your first novel in Italian be?

For most learners at B1, yes, if you read the original slowly. It is the easiest Italian novel in our table of free books: our team placed it at B1. At 41,398 words it takes about 3½ to 7 hours at 200 to 100 words per minute, the two reading speeds used across this site. The chapters are short: the first book edition of 1883 has 36 of them, each a single episode, so you can stop after any chapter without losing the thread.

Two things make it harder than its reputation. It is a nineteenth-century Tuscan book, so some words are old or regional. Its page in our catalogue lists the words worth knowing before you start, among them ciuchino (little donkey) and zecchini (gold coins). It also has 5,998 different word forms, and the story is told in the passato remoto, the past tense of written narrative, so expect verb forms you may not have met in a course. If you are at A2, the ELI retelling at A2 is a gentler first step. Read the original afterwards, once the plot is familiar.

Novecento is the shortest modern book on this page: 64 pages in Feltrinelli’s Universale Economica paperback. Strictly it is not a novel. Baricco wrote it as a monologue for the actor Eugenio Allegri, first staged in July 1994, and called it a story to be read aloud as well. It became Giuseppe Tornatore’s film The Legend of 1900 (1998). If you have seen the film, you already know the plot, which helps when the words run out.

Publishers disagree on its level, which is a good reason to test a page yourself. Klett sells the full text in its Letteratura italiana series as B1, a series of unabridged original texts with notes. Reclam sells the same text, unabridged and unedited, as B2.

Io non ho paura is longer, 219 pages in Einaudi’s 2007 Stile libero paperback, but it is a real novel with a plot that pulls you on. The story is set in a small village in southern Italy in 1978, and its hero is nine-year-old Michele. Reclam’s edition, the Italian original with word notes at the foot of each page, is rated B1–B2. Klett also sells a shortened B1 edition in its Easy Readers series. That one is no longer Ammaniti’s full text, so it counts as a graded reader, not an original.

Baricco’s Seta is another short modern book that appears on lists of Italian books for learners. It runs to 112 pages in Feltrinelli’s 2022 paperback. Klett sells a B1 edition of it in the same Easy Readers series, a line of shortened and simplified texts. The product page does not say how much this title was changed.

It can be, if you read it in pieces. De Amicis published Cuore in 1886 as the diary of Enrico, a pupil in the third year of primary school in Turin, through one school year from October 1881 to July 1882. Each entry is short and dated. Once a month the teacher reads a story aloud to the class, and those nine stories, such as Dagli Appennini alle Ande, stand on their own. That makes the book easy to read a few pages at a time.

We found no publisher who gives the full text a CEFR level, and it is not in our table, so we cannot give a word count. A rough idea of its length: the free Italian LibriVox recording lasts 10 hours 38 minutes in 16 parts. The Italian text is free on Liber Liber, and listening while you read shows you how the words sound. The language is nineteenth-century and the tone sentimental. If you want a modern voice, start with Ammaniti.

• First Italian Readings (A2): not a novel, but an old school reader for English-speaking students, with notes and vocabulary in English. It is useful before your first novel.
• Le avventure di Pinocchio (B1, 41,398 words): the only Italian novel in our table below B2.
• I Robinson italiani by Emilio Salgari (B2, 67,116 words): an adventure story about Italian castaways on a Pacific island, about 5½ to 11 hours of reading.
• Ricordi d’infanzia e di scuola by Edmondo De Amicis (B2, 96,751 words): the author of Cuore remembering his own childhood and school. It is a memoir, not a novel, and long.
• I promessi sposi by Alessandro Manzoni (C1, 230,062 words): see below.

At about C1, ideally after several easier novels: that is the level our team gave it. It is 230,062 words long, more than five times the length of Pinocchio, which works out at about 19 to 38 hours at 200 to 100 words per minute. The final text, published in 1840–42, has 38 chapters. Manzoni revised the language of the final text towards the Florentine spoken by educated people of his time. Nearly two centuries later, much of it reads as old-fashioned. The book’s page in our catalogue lists among the words worth knowing qualcheduno, an old form of qualcuno (someone), and podestà, a title for a town’s chief magistrate.

• The first chapters in the original. Hoepli’s La minaccia di don Rodrigo prints the first three chapters in the 1840 text, with exercises and audio, and labels them B1. It is a 2010 book of 58 pages, a taste of Manzoni rather than the whole novel.
• A retold version. ELI’s Letture Graduate series has a B1 retelling of 112 pages. It tells you the story, but it is not Manzoni’s prose.