Learn Italian with short stories

Stories to read in Italian, with the English beside each paragraph. They open in the browser, with no account needed, and each free one is also a free Italian–English ebook for Kindle, Kobo or any e-reader: downloading needs a free account, no payment (which file to pick).

Open the Italian–English library, where you can search the stories and filter them by level.

Want to hear it too? Italian stories with audio are narrated, free, with a speed control.

By level:

• Beginner (A1–A2): Easy Italian short stories for beginners, with English translation · 171 stories
• Intermediate (B1–B2): Intermediate Italian short stories, side by side with English · 192 stories
• Advanced (C1–C2): Advanced Italian stories, with the English alongside · 34 stories

Every story here carries its level on the Common European Framework, from A1 for beginners to C1 and beyond, so the library works as a set of Italian graded readers, most of them free: start at the level where you understand most of a page, and move up when the English beside it is something you check only now and then.

Italian is a pleasure to read. It is spelled as it sounds, and much of its vocabulary has a Latin cousin in English, so the page gives you more than you might expect from the start.

What trips readers up is literary Italian: the passato remoto of storytelling, pronouns that combine and attach to verbs, and a relaxed word order. A parallel text keeps you in the book while those patterns settle in.

For Italian speakers, reading English books with the Italian alongside smooths over idioms and colloquial dialogue, so the story never stalls.

Families who read in both languages can share the same book, each following the side they read most comfortably.

397 English stories in the library have Italian alongside: Imparare l’inglese con racconti brevi.

Long out of copyright and easy to find as EPUBs. Any of them makes a good first Italian–English parallel text:

• Le avventure di Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi
• I promessi sposi, Alessandro Manzoni
• Novelle rusticane, Giovanni Verga
• Cuore, Edmondo De Amicis

Or use a book you already own: the method works best with something you actually want to read. See how to read a parallel text to get the most from it.