Manzoni was born in Milan in 1785. His official father was Pietro Manzoni, and his mother was Giulia Beccaria, who in turn was the daughter of Cesare Beccaria, an important Enlightenment thinker and author of the book Delitti della Paine. In 1792 his parents separated and his mother moved to Paris, where she lived with Count Carlo Imbonati. Manzoni remained with his father, but at the age of 20, in 1805, He joined his mother in Paris and began to frequent Enlightenment intellectual circles. To console his mother after the death of his partner, he wrote a letter to Carlo Imbonati, and in 1807 his father also died.
In 1808 he married Enriqueta Blondel, a Calvinist, and the same year his firstborn, Julia, was born. In total, Manzoni and Enriqueta had 10 children. During these years, a decisive turning point occurred.
when Manzoni converted to Catholicism together with his wife. This is very important because it will have a huge influence on his works, but also on his vision of life and history. There are different versions of this story. The most romanticized, almost miraculous, legendary one tells us that in 1810 he was in Paris for Napoleon's wedding, but amidst the celebrations, the crowds and the throng, at a certain point he lost his wife, was almost overcome by a panic attack, by anguish, took refuge in a small church where he prayed to the Lord to find his wife and, after leaving the church, the miracle occurred.
However, the most truthful version would speak of a long, meditated journey regarding this conversion to the faith. In 1810 he returned to Milan and between 1812 and 1827 these were Manzoni's most creative and productive years. In 1827 he went to Florence to wash his clothes in the Arno, that is, to learn the Florentine vernacular to apply to his most important work, the betrothed, as we will see later.
In 1833 his wife Enriqueta Blondel died and so in 1837 he remarried Teresa Bori and after the unification of Italy he was appointed senator of the kingdom. His last years, however, were marked by numerous and very painful losses. Eight out of ten children died, both wives, his mother and he also died in Milan at the age of 88. Among his main works we certainly remember The Betrothed, which is a historical novel and is certainly his most important work.
Five sacred hymns, then we have two tragedies, The Count of Carminiola and the Deli and then two civil odes on May 5th on the occasion of the death of Napoleon in March 1821. Now let's look at his most important work, The Betrothed. As for the plot, as you already know, the main characters are Renzo and Lucia who are about to get married, but Don Rodrigo, who is the bad guy in the story, has made a bet with his cousin that he can get Lucia, forcing the poor local priest Don Abondio not to celebrate the wedding. The two poor young people will therefore suffer various adventures, but they will also be helped by several positive characters such as Fra Cristoforo, Cardinal Borromeo, and the unnamed who goes from being powerful and evil to a good character.
And here I will also leave you with this additional file with the various characters and their main characteristics. In the end, the plague arrives and kills several bad guys, including Don Rodrigo himself. And finally Donna Bondio can celebrate the wedding between Renzo and Lucia in peace, who will also have their first daughter Maria, so the story ends with a happy ending.
The first thing to know about The Betrothed, which is very important, is that it is a historical novel, so Manzoni here mixes fictional, tense events with real historical facts. The historical context is very important and precise, detailed in Manzoni's work, and it is a novel set in Lombardy between 1628 and 1630, when it was under Spanish rule. However, Manzoni wrote the novel in the 19th century.
when Lombardi was under Austrian rule. So, to escape Austrian censorship, he adopted a literary expedient. He pretended to have found this manuscript and had simply reworked it.
There are several drafts of the novel. The first was written in 1821-23 and was called Fermat and Lucia. In 1827, the title changed, as did the names of the characters, several chapters, and the plot, and it was published with the title Gli Sposi Promessi. Thank you The definitive version was published in installments between 1840 to 1842 and was called I promesse sposee, and the changes were mainly linguistic. Remember the trip to Florence to rinse his clothes in the Arno?
What did Manzoni do? Replaces several Lombard, archaic terms, and Frenchisms with a more national language, so to speak. In fact, It adopts this Florentine vernacular spoken by a cultured audience and the choice falls on the Florentine vernacular also because it was the literary language of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Galileo, Ariosto, Tasso, therefore the language of the literary tradition.
As for the protagonists, these are simple people, two commoners, humble, oppressed and this is something new as far as literature is concerned. Some historical events really happened. such as the plague of 1628, the descent of the Lanzagenici and there are also several imaginary characters such as Cardinal Borromeo, but also the nun of Monza herself, inspired by a real person, as well as the unnamed one.
We then have this providential vision of life and history, whereby despite the suffering, hardships and injustices suffered by the protagonists, divine providence ultimately helps the humble and oppressed and punishes the oppressors. So, After everything we have seen and said, it is clear that the conversion to Catholicism was decisive not only in the works, but also in the very thought of Monsoni, who was born an Enlightenment thinker. In particular, he was attached to the ideals of the French Revolution, those of freedom, equality and justice.
However, even after his conversion, Manzoni never stopped believing in these ideals and in fact he was very close to the ideals of the Risorgimento that led to the unification of Italy and the expulsion of the Austrians. As for the themes covered in his works, Manzoni is one of the most important exponents of Romanticism. So the main themes are the homeland, faith in God, divine providence, history and also the writer's civil and moral commitment. Finally, regarding poetics, The key words are useful, true, and interesting. And in particular, as Monsoni writes, a literary work must have the useful as its purpose, the true as its subject, and the interesting as its means.
Finally, the difference between historical truth and poetic truth. Historical truth represents the objective truth, faithful to history, as events unfolded. Poetic truth, on the other hand, concerns human truths, that is, the passions, thoughts, fears, and ideas of the characters. However, for Manzoni, the writer must be both a historian and a poet. Therefore, historical truth and poetic truth go hand in hand.