The Betrothed
by Alessandro Manzoni
Summary
Lombardy, 1628, under Spanish rule. Renzo and Lucia, two young silk workers in a village on Lake Como, are due to be married until the local baron, Don Rodrigo, takes a fancy to the bride and the parish priest, a coward drawn with immortal comic precision, finds reasons not to perform the ceremony. The lovers are separated and driven across a Lombardy in collapse: bread riots in Milan, famine, foreign invasion, and finally the plague of 1630, which Manzoni reconstructs from the chronicles in chapters that remain among the great disaster narratives in literature. Lucia is kidnapped by a nameless warlord known only as the Unnamed, whose overnight conversion at the height of his power is the book's moral hinge; Renzo blunders into a riot and out of a city under quarantine; and providence, the novel's true protagonist, gathers everything toward a plague hospital where forgiveness becomes possible and the marriage finally takes place.
Italians meet this book at school the way the English meet Shakespeare, and it rewards a free adult reading far better than a forced adolescent one. It is long, digressive and openly Catholic in its machinery, and it is also warm, ironic and surprisingly funny, a national epic built around two peasants whose only ambition is a wedding.
Manzoni published it in 1827, then spent years rewriting its language into the Tuscan of educated Florence, the famous rinsing of his clothes in the Arno, and the definitive edition of 1840 to 1842 helped standardise the Italian language itself.
Historical Context & Significance
No other novel occupies the place this one holds in its national culture: it is commonly called the most famous and most read novel in Italian, it is taught in nearly every secondary school, and the scholar Sergio Pacifici judged that only Dante receives more intense scholarly attention in Italian letters. Its phrases live in everyday speech, and its subplot of the Nun of Monza compresses the documented case of a real seventeenth century abbess into a handful of unforgettable chapters.
The book's afterlife runs from opera, Ponchielli in 1856 and Petrella in 1869, through repeated film and television adaptations, to an endorsement with few parallels: in 2015 Pope Francis recommended that engaged couples read it before marrying. Its plague chapters found a fresh audience in 2020 for reasons nobody enjoyed.