Just like you, I love love love Italian. I adore the sound of the language: pure music. I adore Italian literature. I adore Italian music. I adore Italian food. I have to hold myself back from kissing any person that speaks Italian on the sidewalk. As you can see, I really kinda dig Italian everything.
The answer to your question depends on your level and on your interests. I remember that a few years back, I learned - almost by heart - the libretti of Puccini's and Mozart's operas, as I was listening to them. They are in the public domain and you can simply follow from your favorite recording of the opera. (Hint: start with Puccini - Madame Butterfly / Huang, Troxell (1996) from Amazon.com)
As an added benefit, you also can sing the arias in your shower when you know them well... It does not look like much, but you can acquire a serious mass of vocabulary in this way. And it's always fun to throw a few lines from Scarpia's aria when meeting a random Italian person in the subway. Or from Dante's inferno.
Last month, I ordered Dino Buzzati's "Il Colombre" - at deastore.it. There is an Audiolibro on CD you can order, too (from a series called "Recitar Leggendo" - I see they carry about 25 titles from the backflap, but not all are original Italian), containing the audio of 6 short stories from "Il Colombre". I just read the text with a dictionary and then when I am finished, I put the audio version in my mp3. Buzzati is such a magical author - and listening to it in the text is almost a mystic experience...
liberliber.it also has a collection of audiobooks you can listen on your mp3 player; these are recorded mainly by amateurs, but the quality is good enough. Check:
http://www.liberliber.it/audiolibri/index.php
Unfortunately, most are not original Italian works, but if your goal is to listen to spoken Italian, then it's good enough.
The book section of the site:
http://www.liberliber.it/libri/index.php
Has many pdfs of works in the public domain - there again, it depends on your interests - but you can find many works of the past centuries, if that is interesting to you.
But Italy is a literate country that publishes a huge number of books per year. It may be worth just buying contemporary novels - if Dante or Boccacio are not your thing - and just read them, and read them cover to cover. If anything, Italian is ridiculously easy compared to Japanese, so you can do that in a snap.
Edited: 2012-09-11, 7:23 pm
