Learn Italian with a Historical Novel. La Copista di Dante

3 Bilingual Glossaries, 25 Exercises with Answer Key, Creative Writing - Intermediate B1-B2

De: Roberto Borzellino

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Ravenna, around 1318.
Sister Chiara is the fastest copyist in her convent's scriptorium. For four years, loose pages have arrived from an exiled Florentine poet — no title, no name — and copying every canto twice, without meaning to, she has learned the whole poem by heart.

When the poet dies in 1321, the final thirteen cantos of his Paradiso are nowhere to be found. Chiara realizes she may be the only living person who can restore them from memory — and starts writing, by candlelight, what she can never admit to knowing.

This is a graded reader for intermediate learners of Italian (B1-B2). The story is written in real, natural Italian, not simplified into baby talk: it is a novel you read for the story, with everything you need to read it without giving up.

WHAT YOU GET IN EVERY CHAPTER: a bilingual glossary of the words highlighted in the text, with translation and a note on how each word is actually used; a glossary of the idiomatic expressions, the ones dictionaries never explain; a set of historical and cultural notes, so you understand the world the story happens in.

PLUS: 25 exercises with a complete answer key at the end of the book; five creative writing tasks, each with a model answer by the author; and a free chapter of another book, as a gift.
Every volume in the series stands on its own: you can start with any book and read it from beginning to end.

Historically grounded: Dante’s exile from Florence, his death at Ravenna in September 1321 and the tradition that the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso were lost and later found are all real, as is the presence of a daughter of Dante who took vows in a convent at Ravenna — remembered as Sister Beatrice, and known by tradition under her secular name, Antonia. What happened to the missing cantos in the months they were gone has never been explained — which is exactly where this story begins.

A note on the poet: Dante never steps onto the page in person. You meet him only as Chiara does — through the pages that reach her convent and the verses she has learned by heart. Present in every line, seen by none.