Alessandro Manzoni

Alessandro Manzoni (Milan, 1785 – Milan, 1873) was an Italian poet, playwright and novelist, and the leading figure of Italian Romanticism. He is remembered above all for The Betrothed, a historical novel that is generally counted among the great works of world literature. He wrote in Italian and in Lombard, and his work did much to shape the modern Italian language.

His mother, Giulia Beccaria, was the daughter of the economist Cesare Beccaria, and his biological father was probably Giovanni Verri rather than Pietro Manzoni, the man who was officially his father. After his parents separated in 1792 he saw little of his mother and was sent to religious boarding schools run by the Somaschi and Barnabite orders. There he gained a solid classical education, though he chafed at the discipline. As a young man he admired Enlightenment ideas and the French Revolution, and his early poem The Triumph of Liberty celebrates it.

Around 1805 he settled with his mother at Auteuil, near Paris, where he mixed with the group of thinkers known as the Idéologues and befriended Claude Charles Fauriel, who introduced him to German Romantic aesthetics. Manzoni never accepted the idea that poetry should be a spontaneous outpouring of feeling; he kept to intellectual control of emotion and to careful form. His neoclassical Urania appeared in 1806-1807, and he later disowned it, along with an elegy on the death of Carlo Imbonati, the man who left his estate at Brusuglio to his mother.

In 1808 he married Henriette Blondel, from a Calvinist family, who converted to Catholicism in 1810. That same year Manzoni returned to religious practice, a turn that shaped the rest of his work. His faith took a strict, Jansenist-influenced form, which appears in his Sacred Hymns and in a treatise on Catholic morality. His theatre began in 1819 with The Count of Carmagnola, a tragedy that broke with the classical unities and sparked a fierce debate; Goethe came to its defence. The events of 1821, including Napoleon's death and the arrest of friends, inspired The Fifth of May and the ode March 1821, on the Piedmontese uprising.

His lasting fame rests on The Betrothed. He began it in 1821 under the title Fermo and Lucia and published it in instalments between 1825 and 1827. He then rewrote it in the Florentine Tuscan he considered more cultivated and suitable for the whole of Italy, and the definitive edition appeared in 1840. The novel tells of thwarted love in seventeenth-century Lombardy, against a background of plague and foreign oppression, and pairs plain prose with a moral view of the powerful and the humble.

His legacy is twofold. The novel became a symbol of the Risorgimento for its patriotic message and helped make modern Italian a common language across the peninsula. He is also associated with a liberal Catholicism that sought to reconcile faith with freedom and justice. He died in Milan in 1873, and his work remains required reading in Italian schools.