Reading from around the world has been a popular reading goal on social media. From colouring in maps to drawing flags in journals: people seem to have an interest in discovering the world from their own living room. I can't blame them: it's much more comfortable to travel in your pyjamas without moving an inch. To help you find some classics to boost this challenge: here are five books from Southern Europe.

1. The Book is Disquiet

by Fernando Passoa

🇵🇹 Portugal

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa's celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced. (read more...)

2. Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments

by Sappho

🇬🇷 Greece 

More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death.  (read more...)

3. Why Read the Classics?

by Italo Calvino

🇮🇹 Italy

Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say they are 'rereading', not 'reading'), this is an absorbing collection of Italo Calvino's witty and passionate criticism. (read more...)

4. Bonjour Tristesse

by Francoise Sagan

🇫🇷 France

Published when she was only eighteen, Françoise Sagan's astonishing novella, Bonjour Tristesse, became an instant bestseller. It tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences. (read more...)

5. The Divine Comedy

by Dante

🇮🇹 Italy

The Comedy tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He presents a vision of the afterlife which is strikingly original in its conception, with a complex architecture and a coherent structure. (read more...)