Learn Italian with a Historical Novel. Il Lupo di Cesare

Graded Reader for Intermediate Learners. Julius Caesar and the War in Gaul. Three Glossaries per Chapter, 25 Exercises with Answer Key. B1-B2

By: Roberto Borzellino

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

A complete novel in real Italian for intermediate readers (B1-B2), with everything you need to read it without stopping to look words up.

Rome, 59 BC. In the Forum, a gladiator called the Wolf spares the life of a young fighter who has stopped defending himself, and disobeys the sponsor of the games in front of half the city. Watching from the stands is a thin man in a plain toga who neither cheers nor whistles. He owns the school. His name is Julius Caesar.

Before Sulla’s proscriptions, the Wolf was Gaius Norbanus, the son of a consul. Now he is a man without a name. Caesar offers him a bargain: five years of war in Gaul in exchange for his freedom. In Gaul, Norbanus does the work he was chosen for — watch, count, report — until he is asked to make a prisoner talk who will not talk. To get his own name back, he will have to do to another man exactly what Sulla did to his father.

The story is written in real, natural Italian, not simplified into baby talk. It is a novel you read for the story, and a graded reader for intermediate learners of Italian (B1-B2).

You never have to stop reading to look something up. Every chapter ends with three glossaries: about thirty highlighted words with their translation and a note on how each one is really used; the idiomatic expressions dictionaries never explain; and the historical and cultural notes that make the world of the story make sense.

Twenty-five exercises with a complete answer key at the end of the book, and five creative writing tasks, each with a model answer by the author. Everything you need to work alone, without a teacher. A free chapter of another book comes with it, 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: Caesar really did own a gladiatorial school at Capua; in 59 BC there was no stone amphitheatre in Rome and the games were held in the Forum on wooden stands; at the river Sabis, Caesar seized a shield from a soldier and went to the front line calling his centurions by name.