In this paper, I aim to introduce the course book Grammatica ungherese e libro di lettura by Emerico Donáth, which was written in 1904 and published in Fiume, a seaside Italian-majority town in Austria-Hungary. At the beginning of the 20th century, foreign language teaching and learning was still in its infancy, and it was characterised by the so-called “grammar-translation method”, which reflects itself in Donáth’s Hungarian as a foreign language course book written for Italian native speakers. In this study, I have tried to detect didactic peculiarities, which can help draw conclusions about Hungarian as a foreign language in the era.