Manzoni's The Betrothed

The story

“That branch of Lake Como”

This is how the most famous novel in Italian literature begins: “That branch of Lake Como, which turns towards the south, between two unbroken chains of mountains, all coves and bays, according to the jutting out and drawing back of those mountains, suddenly narrows...”. Anyone who has studied it at school remembers this long sentence, and perhaps remembers how hard it was to read. But behind that novel, “The Betrothed” (“I promessi sposi”), there is a story full of adventure, humour and courage.

The author, Alessandro Manzoni, was born in Milan in 1785 into a noble family, and lived in a time of great change: the French Revolution, Napoleon, the Restoration. On his mother's side he was the grandson of Cesare Beccaria, the Enlightenment thinker who wrote “On Crimes and Punishments”. As a young man he lived in Paris, where he came to know the ideas of the Enlightenment, but after returning to Milan, following a spiritual crisis, he turned back to the Catholic faith, which influenced all his work.

A story from the 1600s

Manzoni worked on the novel for years, starting in 1821, writing a first version entitled “Fermo and Lucia”. He then reworked everything over several years, and between 1825 and 1827 he published the first edition of “The Betrothed”, in three volumes. The story is set in Lombardy in 1628–1630, when the country was ruled by the Spanish, a time of bullying, famine and plague. At the start Manzoni says that he found the story in an old 17th-century manuscript and has only rewritten it in language that is easier to understand: it was a literary trick, a game.

The main characters are two young people of humble background, Renzo, a silk spinner, and Lucia, an honest girl. They are about to get married, but a bullying local lord, Don Rodrigo, has fallen for Lucia and, because of a bet with his cousin, wants to stop the wedding. He sends his “bravi”, armed men, to threaten the village priest, Don Abbondio, a fearful man, who says: “This marriage is not to be, neither tomorrow, nor ever”. Don Abbondio, out of fear, refuses to perform the wedding.

Flight, riots and plague

With the help of a brave friar, Fra Cristoforo, Renzo and Lucia try to escape Don Rodrigo's persecution, and have to separate. Lucia takes refuge in a convent at Monza, where she meets the mysterious nun Gertrude, a victim of her family's demands. Renzo goes to Milan, where he finds himself in the middle of a popular revolt over the price of bread, in November 1628, and is mistaken for a ringleader of the rioters: he has to flee to another state.

Lucia, kidnapped by Don Rodrigo's men, is taken to the castle of a powerful lord, the Unnamed, a cruel man. But, shaken by her sadness and her prayers, the Unnamed has a crisis and is converted: he sets her free. Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, welcomes him with great kindness.

Then war and plague, brought by the foreign troops of the Landsknechts, devastate Lombardy. Milan is struck by a terrible epidemic, and Renzo, who has caught the disease and recovered, goes back to the city to look for Lucia in the lazzaretto, the hospital where the sick were crowded together. There he finds Fra Cristoforo, who dies caring for the sick, and Lucia, who has fallen ill and recovered. Don Rodrigo dies of plague. In the end, the two young people can marry.

A language for Italy

Manzoni did not only want to tell a story. At the time Italy was divided into several states, and there was no language spoken by everyone: each person used their own dialect, and written Italian was a literary language, far from the language of everyday life. Manzoni thought that a united Italy would need a common language, one that was alive and easy to understand.

So, after the first edition, he revised the whole novel, and in 1840–42 he published a new edition, “the Quarantana”, with illustrations by Francesco Gonin. To do this, he went to Florence, where, he said, the liveliest Italian was spoken, and he went “to rinse his clothes in the Arno”: he replaced many Lombard and literary words with Florentine ones. The novel became a model of the language for millions of Italians. For the first anniversary of Manzoni's death (1874), the composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote a great Requiem Mass for him.