This textbook has been used at UCLA since 2007 for a course of reading from Italian to English for graduate students with prior experience in learning a foreign language. It is designed for a 10-week course and quickly enables students to understand and translate authentic material from Italian. From the beginning, students learn how to recognize the Italian structures and translate from simple to complex passages, with many taken from literary sources of various periods. It is not a grammar nor a theory of translation textbook.
The book is divided into 8 chapters with 10 appendices at the end. Each chapter has various grammatical structures followed by a practice of translations and passages. The practices have no answers as there can be many possible solutions.