Italian short stories for beginners (A1)

What does A1 Italian reading look like?

One short sentence at a time, nearly always in the present tense, with the subject left out whenever the verb ending makes it obvious. Here is Marco at the Thursday market in Montepulciano, a moment before his story starts:

Those three habits turn up in almost every line at this level. Adjectives usually come after the noun and change their ending to match it. Possessives travel with an article (la sua sciarpa, il suo quaderno), except in front of a single family member: sua madre, suo cugino. And short prepositions fuse with the article after them, so you read nel cortile, alla porta, sul pavimento and dalla finestra rather than in il, a la or su il.

Which small words slow beginners down?

Mostly the articles. Italian has seven words for "the": il, lo, la and l' in the singular, i, gli and le in the plural. Gender decides some of it and the first sound of the next word decides the rest, which is why A1 chapters give you il pavimento but lo sguardo, l'appartamento and gli occhi. A table of rules helps less than a week of chapters in which you meet gli occhi twenty times.

The other phrase to catch early is c'è (there is) with its plural ci sono (there are). It sets the scene in nearly every chapter: C'è polvere ovunque in the hidden flat behind Marco's door, while the market in Montepulciano has molte persone, molte verdure, molti colori, introduced by ci sono.

Which A1 Italian story should I read first?

• For a mystery: La Chiave di Via Garibaldi, in which Marco's suspiciously cheap Milan flat comes with a key that opens a door closed for years, or Le Lettere di Via Garibaldi, where unsigned letters left at a door in Venice lead an archivist to a stone plaque bearing her mother's name.
• For comedy: La Panchina delle Sette e Un Quarto, two dogs and one bench in Turin's Parco del Valentino; Il Mistero del Lunedì, in which a 78-year-old investigates the scarf that vanished from her building's laundry room; or Mamma Robot.
• For romance: Promessa per Sbaglio, which starts with a joke proposal texted to the wrong Marco, or Il Codice della Lampada, a lamp across the courtyard that blinks a name at night.
• For family stories: Il Segreto di Nonna Assunta, an 80th-birthday surprise under a lemon tree in Ostuni; Le Due Facce di Giulia, twin sisters in Bologna who swap lives; or the flagship, La Pensione Bellavista.

Finding A1 easy? The A2 Italian stories bring in the past tense. You can also browse every Italian series, or warm up with the first 100 Italian words.