ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The best books from Italy

Ranked by literary regard, the best Italian books run from Dante's Divine Comedy — the summit of medieval literature — through Calvino, Primo Levi, Umberto Eco, and Elena Ferrante. This list ranks the top Italian works in ReadingRate's catalogue, each with a difficulty score and reading-time estimate.

A computed ranking: the highest literary-regard scores among works by Italian authors in our catalogue. Italy's list is unusually top-heavy — Dante stands with Homer and Shakespeare — but the modern entries, Ferrante and Calvino especially, are some of the most readable books on any list on this site.

1–10

  1. Inferno by Dante Alighieri (1314, difficulty 5.9/10)
  2. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1320, difficulty 6.7/10)
  3. Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri (1315, difficulty 6.1/10)
  4. Paradiso by Dante Alighieri (1320, difficulty 6.3/10)
  5. Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas (1467, difficulty 8.6/10)
  6. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532, difficulty 3.6/10)
  7. Canzoniere by Petrarch (1374, difficulty 7.1/10)
  8. Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921, difficulty 6.4/10)
  9. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353, difficulty 4.7/10)
  10. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972, difficulty 6.2/10)

11–20

  1. Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri (1294, difficulty 5.2/10)
  2. De Vulgari Eloquentia by Dante Alighieri (1304, difficulty 6.9/10)
  3. Discourses on Livy by Niccolò Machiavelli (1531, difficulty 4.0/10)
  4. The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari (1550, difficulty 3.4/10)
  5. Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1947, difficulty 4.6/10)
  6. Canti by Giacomo Leopardi (1835, difficulty 7.2/10)
  7. The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi (1986, difficulty 5.1/10)
  8. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975, difficulty 5.9/10)
  9. Cuttlefish Bones by Eugenio Montale (1925, difficulty 5.8/10)
  10. Boccaccio: The Man and His Works by Vittore Branca (1975, difficulty 4.7/10)

21–30

  1. Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1516, difficulty 5.7/10)
  2. New Science by Giambattista Vico (1725, difficulty 5.9/10)
  3. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino (1982, difficulty 7.4/10)
  4. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958, difficulty 6.4/10)
  5. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980, difficulty 6.4/10)
  6. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (1988, difficulty 8.0/10)
  7. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1827, difficulty 6.0/10)
  8. Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino (1983, difficulty 5.6/10)
  9. On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria (1764, difficulty 4.4/10)
  10. Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino (1988, difficulty 6.1/10)

31–40

  1. The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1528, difficulty 6.2/10)
  2. Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo (1923, difficulty 7.0/10)
  3. Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci (1948, difficulty 7.7/10)
  4. The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo (1300, difficulty 4.1/10)
  5. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (1965, difficulty 6.9/10)
  6. Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante (1957, difficulty 7.1/10)
  7. The Truce by Primo Levi (1963, difficulty 3.9/10)
  8. Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg (1963, difficulty 6.5/10)
  9. History: A Novel by Elsa Morante (1974, difficulty 3.3/10)
  10. The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia (1961, difficulty 6.1/10)

41–50

  1. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese (1950, difficulty 3.7/10)
  2. The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga (1881, difficulty 5.9/10)
  3. That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda (1957, difficulty 8.1/10)
  4. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini (1728, difficulty 5.3/10)
  5. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (1957, difficulty 6.7/10)
  6. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (1883, difficulty 3.7/10)
  7. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani (1962, difficulty 6.3/10)
  8. Mastro-don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga (1889, difficulty 7.0/10)
  9. Mandragola by Niccolò Machiavelli (1524, difficulty 3.7/10)
  10. One, No One and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello (1926, difficulty 6.1/10)

51–60

  1. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante (2013, difficulty 6.3/10)
  2. Baudolino by Umberto Eco (2000, difficulty 7.0/10)
  3. The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino (1952, difficulty 5.7/10)
  4. The Path to the Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino (1947, difficulty 5.6/10)
  5. Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (1945, difficulty 5.4/10)
  6. And Suddenly It's Evening by Salvatore Quasimodo (1942, difficulty 5.5/10)
  7. Henry IV by Luigi Pirandello (1922, difficulty 6.1/10)
  8. The Conformist by Alberto Moravia (1951, difficulty 6.1/10)
  9. Mistero Buffo by Dario Fo (1969, difficulty 5.7/10)
  10. The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino (1959, difficulty 6.6/10)

61–70

  1. Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi (1994, difficulty 5.9/10)
  2. Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini (1941, difficulty 6.8/10)
  3. The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello (1904, difficulty 5.6/10)
  4. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (1944, difficulty 7.6/10)
  5. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011, difficulty 6.9/10)
  6. The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante (2012, difficulty 7.0/10)
  7. Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso (1581, difficulty 5.4/10)
  8. Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone (1936, difficulty 6.0/10)
  9. The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (2002, difficulty 6.1/10)
  10. Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante (1992, difficulty 6.4/10)

71–80

  1. Two Women by Alberto Moravia (1957, difficulty 4.9/10)
  2. Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino (1963, difficulty 4.5/10)
  3. Convivio by Dante Alighieri (1307, difficulty 5.6/10)
  4. Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo (1970, difficulty 4.7/10)
  5. Odi barbare by Giosuè Carducci (1877, difficulty 5.6/10)
  6. Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano (2006, difficulty 6.3/10)
  7. Florentine Histories by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532, difficulty 4.4/10)
  8. The House on the Hill by Cesare Pavese (1948, difficulty 7.1/10)
  9. Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino (1970, difficulty 6.4/10)
  10. The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante (2019, difficulty 5.7/10)

81–90

  1. De Monarchia by Dante Alighieri (1313, difficulty 4.2/10)
  2. A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: Supernatural, Sensational, Sentimental by Maurizio Ascari (2007, difficulty 6.1/10)
  3. Death at La Fenice by Donna Leon (1992, difficulty 2.9/10)
  4. The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante (2006, difficulty 5.2/10)
  5. The Child by Maria Montessori (1936, difficulty 1.9/10)
  6. The Mother by Grazia Deledda (1920, difficulty 5.0/10)
  7. Ashes by Grazia Deledda (1904, difficulty 4.1/10)
  8. Reeds in the Wind by Grazia Deledda (1913, difficulty 5.3/10)
  9. Each in His Own Way by Luigi Pirandello (1924, difficulty 5.7/10)
  10. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg (1947, difficulty 4.9/10)

91–100

  1. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940, difficulty 6.1/10)
  2. Elias Portolu by Grazia Deledda (1903, difficulty 5.9/10)
  3. Ties by Domenico Starnone (2014, difficulty 6.5/10)
  4. Tonight We Improvise by Luigi Pirandello (1930, difficulty 5.3/10)
  5. Contempt by Alberto Moravia (1954, difficulty 4.8/10)
  6. The Ballad of the Salty Sea by Hugo Pratt (1967, difficulty 5.3/10)
  7. Silk by Alessandro Baricco (1996, difficulty 5.9/10)
  8. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (2016, difficulty 5.8/10)
  9. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (2017, difficulty 3.3/10)
  10. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli (2014, difficulty 2.3/10)

Questions people actually ask

What are the best Italian books?
The Divine Comedy leads by a distance, followed by works from Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, Umberto Eco, and Elena Ferrante. ReadingRate ranks the top entries by literary-regard data.
Is Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend worth reading?
It holds high literary regard and comparatively low difficulty — a rare combination on these lists, and one reason the Neapolitan novels are a common gateway into Italian literature.
Is The Divine Comedy hard to read?
Yes — it scores among the most demanding works in the catalogue, mostly for symbolic density and historical reference rather than sentence difficulty. A well-annotated translation moderates it considerably.