Excellent Book
The Graded Italian Reader, edited by Vincenzo and Angelina Cioffari, is certainly one of the best readers for those who want to learn Italian. The lessons are provided in a "graded" fashion, which means that the reading selection get more and more difficult as one works through the book. Vocabulary and idioms are glossed at the bottom of each page for convenience, and there is a dictionary at the back of the book so one does not need to pack around an extra lexicon. I've used the Graded German Reader published also by Heath. When I started learning Italian, I sought out this volume specifically since I was so impressed by the German volume. A must have for increasing your reading fluency in Italian. Works really great in tandem with a "spoken" Italian program such as Pimsleur.