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«… It is not merely a book for learning Italian; it is also an amusing, sometimes uncomfortable, reflection of the realities of Italian male culture.»
Domenico Preziosi & Olga G.
Domenico Preziosi and Olga G. are the co-authors behind these Italian graded readers — a certified Italian teacher and a writer, working together to turn language learning into stories worth reading.
Domenico Preziosi
Author
Domenico Preziosi is a CEDILS-certified teacher of Italian as a foreign language (Ca' Foscari University, Venice), with a degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Cagliari. That academic background shaped a lasting fascination with how people actually learn languages — not from rules, but from stories.
His path to teaching was anything but linear. Before Italian classrooms, there was a Master's degree in Tourism Economics from Bocconi University, hands-on work in permaculture design, and years spent managing tourism services and international relations. Each of these experiences left him with a fresh set of stories, settings, and characters to draw from — material that eventually found its way into his books.
Domenico doesn't consider himself a writer in the traditional sense. He describes himself first as a teacher trying to help his students — and it was one specific student who changed the direction of his work: a young boy from Kazakhstan, newly arrived in Italy, who needed to learn Italian from zero just to start school. That experience shaped how Domenico thinks about reading material for language learners: stories that are simple and fluid, but never dull; entertaining and well-paced, but built to genuinely teach something real.
His graded readers use Italy itself as the backdrop — not a postcard version of the country, but one that shows its contradictions, its regional differences, its light side and its dark side. He avoids stereotypes and easy narratives, preferring characters who are unpredictable and human, flaws included, because that's how a country is actually told.
His goal is simple: readers who finish one book already want to start the next.
His path to teaching was anything but linear. Before Italian classrooms, there was a Master's degree in Tourism Economics from Bocconi University, hands-on work in permaculture design, and years spent managing tourism services and international relations. Each of these experiences left him with a fresh set of stories, settings, and characters to draw from — material that eventually found its way into his books.
Domenico doesn't consider himself a writer in the traditional sense. He describes himself first as a teacher trying to help his students — and it was one specific student who changed the direction of his work: a young boy from Kazakhstan, newly arrived in Italy, who needed to learn Italian from zero just to start school. That experience shaped how Domenico thinks about reading material for language learners: stories that are simple and fluid, but never dull; entertaining and well-paced, but built to genuinely teach something real.
His graded readers use Italy itself as the backdrop — not a postcard version of the country, but one that shows its contradictions, its regional differences, its light side and its dark side. He avoids stereotypes and easy narratives, preferring characters who are unpredictable and human, flaws included, because that's how a country is actually told.
His goal is simple: readers who finish one book already want to start the next.
Ready to start? Explore our Italian graded readers
Explore Our Graded Readers in Italian
Tonio "Il Gatto"
Same blood, same island, a very different way of surviving it.
I delitti al bar
Two brothers, one bar, and a mystery that reaches back a generation.
Il Napoletano
A boy from Naples's toughest streets builds a criminal empire — and pays the price for it.
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