Underwater: A Tale

Rovetta, Gerolamo, 1854-1910Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.1

Word count: 321K words
Chapters: 33

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Sott'acqua: racconto by Gerolamo RovettaAuthor: Rovetta, Gerolamo, 1854-1910,Language: Italian, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: May 10, 2013

Editor's review

Sott'acqua (Underwater) is a novella by the Italian writer Gerolamo Rovetta; the Project Gutenberg edition is the original Italian text. Rovetta lived from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and his narratives focus largely on the circumstances and emotional struggles of ordinary people. This work, titled "Underwater," carries a metaphorical charge, pointing to the hidden and repressed dimensions of life. It is short, with a slow narrative pace and finely drawn psychological and environmental detail. It serves well as an introductory sample of late nineteenth-century Italian narrative literature and as close-reading material for learners of Italian. Readers should note how the title image echoes through the plot and how restrainedly the author handles his characters' predicaments; since this is a public-domain electronic text without modern annotations, details concerning the historical background must be researched by the reader.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Intermediate and advanced Italian learners using it for close reading of the original
Readers interested in late nineteenth-century Italian narrative literature
Readers who enjoy short novellas with finely wrought psychological detail
Foreign literature students seeking an introductory sample of Rovetta's work

Not a good fit for

General readers without the ability to read Italian
Readers who prefer fast-paced plots and strong dramatic conflict
Beginners in classical literature who need detailed annotations and introductions

Reading tips

Read through once to grasp the plot, then go through a second time to look up unfamiliar words and sentence patterns.
Note the recurring echoes of the "underwater" title image in the text and make brief annotations.
After finishing, look up Rovetta's life and the social background of late nineteenth-century Italy to fill in the context.
Read alongside other Italian short and medium-length works of the same period to compare narrative styles.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is there a Chinese translation of this book?

The version provided here is the Project Gutenberg electronic edition of the original Italian text; the materials do not mention any Chinese translation. To read in Chinese, you would need to find a domestically published translation separately or use translation tools to assist with the original.

What level of Italian is needed to read it?

The text is literary narrative with fairly complex syntax, so intermediate or higher reading ability in Italian is recommended. Beginners can read paragraph by paragraph with a dictionary, focusing on character description and scene-setting, without insisting on getting through it in one pass.

How should the title "Sott'acqua" be understood?

Literally it means "underwater." In literary works such titles often carry metaphorical weight, suggesting a submerged or obscured situation or mood. Its specific meaning needs to be felt in relation to the plot and the characters' fates; while reading, note the water and sinking imagery in the text.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Rovetta, Gerolamo, 1854-1910 Author

Gerolamo Rovetta (1854–1910) was an Italian author, with fourteen of his works held in this collection. Because public information is limited, the details of his life are difficult to describe at length, yet the surviving titles give a fair picture of his writing: he produced both novels and plays, and his representative works include Mater dolorosa, Casta diva, La baraonda, La moglie di Sua Eccellenza, L'idolo, La Signorina: Romanzo, Sott'acqua: racconto, and the three-act comedy La trilogia di Dorina. These works mostly take social reality and family ethics as their themes, unfolding their plots with care and giving their characters a marked dramatic tension, which shows that he was skilled in both narrative and stage writing. In this collection his works are classified under inspirational growth, suggesting that in the Chinese context they are regarded as reading with an edifying quality.