A series from Espresso Publishing House

Espresso Italian Classics

Nineteenth-century Italian fiction, newly translated into English.

Italian literature of the nineteenth century produced some of the most original popular fiction in Europe: serialised novels that commanded enormous readerships, circulated across the peninsula, and drew on a tradition utterly unlike anything produced in Paris or London. Almost none of it has ever been translated into English.

The Espresso Italian Classics series is a sustained effort to change that. Each title in the series is a new translation made directly from the original Italian, with a full editorial apparatus: introduction, translator’s note, and the contextual framing that allows an English-language reader to encounter the work on its own terms. Translated by Idara Crespi.

Titles in the Series

The Blind Woman of Sorrento

The Blind Woman of Sorrento

La Cieca di Sorrento  ·  Francesco Mastriani, 1852

Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi

Kindle & Paperback Published March 2026

One of the most widely read Italian novels of the nineteenth century: serialised, reprinted, staged as opera, and beloved by generations of Neapolitan readers. We can trace no English translation of it before ours. The novel centres on Gennariello, a young man of uncertain parentage, whose fate becomes entangled with the secrets of an aristocratic family. Those secrets involve identity, inheritance, and crime. Mastriani’s Naples is rendered with social precision and moral charge: a city where the distance between wealth and want is measured in the space of a street.

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Story of a Blackcap

Story of a Blackcap March 2027

Storia di una capinera  ·  Giovanni Verga, 1871

Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi

Kindle & Paperback Forthcoming March 2027

Giovanni Verga’s first popular success, published in 1871. The novel established his reputation before the darker realist work for which he is best known. Written entirely in letters, it tells the story of a young woman confined to a convent against her will, whose correspondence with a childhood friend becomes her only passage to the world outside. Heartbreaking and formally precise, it has been read in Italy for 150 years and comes into English here in a new literary translation.

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Paperback edition available March 2027.

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Marta, or Faith

Marta, or Faith September 2026

I Misteri di Napoli, Vol. I  ·  Francesco Mastriani, 1869–70

Translated and introduced by Idara Crespi

Kindle & Paperback Publication date 15 September 2026

Mastriani’s most ambitious novel: a panoramic portrait of nineteenth-century Naples, running to hundreds of chapters and read across the Italian peninsula. When Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris captivated Europe, it sparked imitators across the continent. None were more ambitious than what Mastriani produced for Naples. Marta, or Faith is the opening volume: an introduction to a cast of characters whose stories will unfold across the trilogy, set against a city of startling beauty and stark inequality. We can trace no complete English translation of any part of I Misteri di Napoli before ours.

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About the translator

Idara Crespi was born in Milan and grew up between Italy and Canada. She is the founding publisher of Espresso Publishing House and the translator responsible for the Italian catalogue. Her approach to translation begins with the original: not a previous version, not a summary, but the source text in Italian, read closely and worked through sentence by sentence. What emerges is a new English text made specifically for contemporary readers: faithful to what the original does, not to the conventions of an earlier era’s translation.

Read more about Idara Crespi and the Espresso Italian Classics →