Alessandro Manzoni

Alessandro Manzoni: The Man Who Wrote Italy Into Existence

In 1827 Alessandro Manzoni published the novel that would become the most widely read work in the Italian language — and then decided it was written in the wrong language. Italy had no unified tongue; its citizens spoke provincial dialects, and he had written his masterpiece in a Lombard-inflected literary Italian he found unsatisfactory the moment he saw it in print. He spent the next fifteen years fixing it, travelling to Florence to consult Tuscan intellectuals and, as he put it, to rinse his clothes in the Arno. When Italy unified, it did so partly in his prose.

Grandson of the Enlightenment

Manzoni was born in Milan on 7 March 1785 into an aristocratic family that gave him almost nothing. His nominal father, Pietro Manzoni, was a stolid middle-aged member of the Lecco landed gentry; his mother, Giulia Beccaria, showed little maternal interest and had conducted an affair with Giovanni Verri, leaving the boy's paternity permanently uncertain. He was farmed out to a wet nurse and then to religious boarding schools — the Somaschi friars from 1791 to 1798, the Barnabite fathers from 1798 to 1801. The regime produced a shy, withdrawn man prone to lifelong phobias and nervous disorders, and, at first, a convinced young atheist.

The formative family influence came from his maternal grandfather, Cesare Beccaria, the Enlightenment jurist whose *On Crimes and Punishments* had reformed European penal theory by arguing that punishment exists to protect society rather than to avenge it. That inheritance — a cool, reforming interest in how institutions grind ordinary people down — runs through everything Manzoni later wrote, and it is the reason his great novel is as much about bad law and worse government as about young love.

Paris, and a Marriage That Changed His Faith

In 1805, after the death of Carlo Imbonati, Manzoni joined his mother in Paris and stayed until 1810. The salons introduced him to the circle of the *idéologues* and, decisively, to Claude-Charles Fauriel, a lifelong correspondent. He became fluent in French and steeped in French literature; the cosmopolitan Enlightenment habit of mind never left him.

In 1808 he married Henriette — Enrichetta — Blondel, a sixteen-year-old Swiss Calvinist whose gentle, loving and strong character gave him the domestic stability he had never known. In 1810 she, Manzoni and his mother all entered the Catholic Church, and the family returned to Italy. Sources differ on the pace of it: one account places the conversion squarely in 1810, another describes a gradual return to faith maturing around 1816 under the influence of Jansenist-leaning clergy who had guided his wife. What is not in doubt is the result. The anticlerical young atheist became the most serious Catholic imagination in nineteenth-century Italian letters, and the moral architecture of his fiction — providence working invisibly through catastrophe — dates from this period.

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Hymns, and a Dead Emperor

The rekindled faith produced the *Inni Sacri* (*Sacred Hymns*), written between 1812 and 1815, of which five were completed, including "The Resurrection" and "Pentecost." In 1819 he published *Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica*, a defence of Catholic morality against Enlightenment attack — an argument, in effect, with his own grandfather's world.

Then, in 1821, Napoleon died on Saint Helena, and Manzoni wrote "Il cinque maggio" — "The Fifth of May" — in a matter of days. It remains one of the most famous odes in Italian, a poem that refuses both hagiography and contempt, weighing an emperor's glory against his death as a nobody on a rock.

Breaking the Rules

Manzoni's two verse tragedies, *Il conte di Carmagnola* (1820) and *Adelchi* (1822), were deliberate provocations: he abandoned the classical unities of time and place that governed Italian and French drama, and defended the decision in his *Letter to M. Chauvet on the Unities* (1820). The plays are less read now than argued about, but the argument mattered — it was Italian Romanticism declaring that historical truth outranked inherited form.

The Betrothed

Between April 1821 and September 1823 he drafted *Fermo e Lucia*, a version so different from the finished book that it was not published until 1916, long after his death. Reworked, it appeared in three volumes between 1825 and 1827 as *I promessi sposi*.

The story is deceptively modest. In the Spanish-ruled Duchy of Milan between 1628 and 1630, two peasants, Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella, are prevented from marrying because the local baron Don Rodrigo wants Lucia for himself. What follows is separation, flight, false accusation, kidnapping, riot, famine, war and finally the plague that emptied Milan in 1630 — chapters 31 to 34 remain among the greatest accounts of an epidemic in European literature, built on Giuseppe Ripamonti's 1640 chronicle and unsparing about the mass paranoia that produced lynchings of suspected "anointers." Manzoni completed a documentary companion piece, *Storia della colonna infame*, in 1829 and published it as an appendix in 1842. "The great questions about evil, about innocents suffering, are the underlying theme of the book," and Manzoni conspicuously declines to answer them.

Rinsing His Clothes in the Arno

The revision is the part that made him a national institution. Dissatisfied with the 1827 language, Manzoni spent roughly thirteen to fifteen years stripping out Lombard regionalisms and rewriting the whole novel in Florentine Tuscan — the dialect of Dante — working with Florentine intellectuals. Even the hero's name changed, Fermo becoming Lorenzo, Renzo. The definitive edition appeared in 1840–42. In 1868 he capped the project with a government report, *Dell'unità della lingua e dei mezzi di diffonderla*, on how to spread the national language.

The effect was constitutional. Together with the *Divine Comedy*, *The Betrothed* is credited with establishing Tuscan as standard Italian. A country that did not yet exist acquired a prose in which to exist.

A Life Shadowed by Death

His private life was a catalogue of loss. Children died in 1811 and 1823; Enrichetta died in 1833 and their eldest daughter Giulia in 1834. He remarried in 1837, to Teresa Borri Stampa, and outlived all but two of his many children. The phobias never lifted — he reputedly weighed his clothes several times a day. Unified Italy granted him a pension and made him a senator in its first parliament in 1860, and Rome made him an honorary citizen in 1872. He died on 22 May 1873. The state funeral, attended by Prince Umberto of Savoy, was treated as a national tragedy, and Giuseppe Verdi wrote his *Messa da Requiem* in Manzoni's memory, premiered in Milan in 1874 — the "Manzoni Requiem" ever since.

Why Alessandro Is Called a Genius

The quality is architectural patience. Most novelists write a book; Manzoni wrote a book three times over across two decades, holding an enormous historical machine — plague, famine, foreign occupation, ecclesiastical politics, criminal law — in tension with two entirely ordinary young people, and never letting the machine crush them into symbols. Scholars credit him with two things almost no other novelist has done: discovering "a national prose language" and capturing "the spiritual essence of his nation." Sir Walter Scott, the man who invented the form Manzoni was working in, called it by far the best novel he had written. Sergio Pacifici notes that only the *Divine Comedy* has attracted more intense Italian scholarship.

The honest counter-case is that this stature is largely national, and that it costs him readers. Outside Italy Manzoni is admired more than read; the book's reputation abroad rests on excerpts, chiefly the plague. Inside Italy the opposite problem applies — it is compulsory reading for fifteen-year-olds, which has done its liveliness no favours. Critics have long argued over the providential Catholic frame, which can read as consolation imposed on suffering the novel has just shown to be arbitrary, and his work "sparked debates regarding religious and social interpretations" from the start. The verse tragedies are today of mainly historical interest. Manzoni is a one-book genius — but the book helped make a country.

Legacy

*I promessi sposi* is the most widely read work in the Italian language, standard in Italian secondary schools, and a permanent supplier of idiom: a *perpetua* is still a priest's housekeeper, and "questo matrimonio non s'ha da fare" is still what Italians say when something has been forbidden by someone with more power than right. It has been made into operas by Ponchielli and Petrella and filmed repeatedly since 1908; in 2015 Pope Francis recommended it to engaged couples. Few writers have lived to see such adoration, and fewer still have left their country not just a masterpiece but the words to discuss it in.