A series from Espresso Publishing House

Espresso Italian Classics

Nineteenth-century Italian fiction, newly translated into English for the first time.

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. It has never been translated into English until now. At its centre: Gennariello, a young man of uncertain parentage, whose fate becomes entangled with the secrets of an aristocratic family — secrets involving identity, inheritance, and crime. Mastriani's Naples is vivid, socially observed, and morally charged: a city where the distance between wealth and want is measured in the space of a street.

Kindle — $4.99 Paperback — $16.99

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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 that 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 never received a worthy English translation. This edition is the first.

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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 · Forthcoming September 2026

Mastriani's masterwork: a panoramic novel of nineteenth-century Naples that ran to hundreds of chapters and was read across the Italian peninsula. When Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris captivated Europe, it sparked imitators across the continent — but none 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 profound inequality. The first English translation of any volume of I Misteri di Napoli.

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Paperback edition available September 2026.

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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 →