Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed: Plot, Editions and Real Models

A man between reason and faith

Alessandro Manzoni was born in Milan on 7 March 1785. His mother, Giulia Beccaria, was the daughter of Cesare Beccaria, the Enlightenment author of “On Crimes and Punishments”: an intellectual inheritance that weighed on his son’s upbringing. Formally, Alessandro was the son of Count Pietro Manzoni, Giulia’s husband; even during his lifetime, an unconfirmed rumor circulated about an affair between his mother and Giovanni Verri, brother of the better-known Pietro Verri.

The education he received as a boy was strict: first with the Somaschi fathers, between the colleges of Merate and Lugano, then with the Barnabites at the Longone college, on the outskirts of Milan, schooling he would later, as an adult, recall in harsh terms. In 1805 he joined his mother in Paris, where he mixed with the idéologues, the intellectual heirs of the Enlightenment philosophes and of the openness that followed the French Revolution, and struck up a steady correspondence with the historian Claude Fauriel on questions of language and literature.

In 1808 he married the very young Enrichetta Blondel, from a Calvinist family, in a civil and Calvinist ceremony. His path to Catholicism took several years and passed through his meeting with the spiritual father Eustachio Degola, a converted Jansenist; a famous anecdote places him on 2 April 1810, when, during the Paris celebrations for Napoleon’s wedding to Marie Louise of Austria, panic over some exploding fireworks caused fatalities in the crowd, and Manzoni, separated from Enrichetta, is said to have taken refuge on the steps of the church of Saint-Roch in a moment of religious crisis — an episode whose origin and historical accuracy critics still debate. His marriage to Enrichetta was later also celebrated with a Catholic rite, on 15 February 1810.

Manzoni became the fullest representative of a synthesis between the liberal strand of the Enlightenment and the ethical depth of Catholic faith as revived by Romanticism, oriented toward the renewal of the Italian nation: a different path from that of a contemporary such as Giacomo Leopardi, who in those same years looked at Italian Romanticism with an altogether different sensibility. In 1848, during the Five Days of Milan, Manzoni took a position, with his usual reserve, on patriotic and democratic lines; in 1860 he became a senator of the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1861 he took part in the Senate session in Turin that voted in favor of proclaiming Victor Emmanuel II king of Italy, the same political season told in the recap on the Risorgimento.

Widowed by Enrichetta in 1833, he later married Teresa Borri, herself a widow, and was in turn widowed by her in 1861. He died in Milan on 22 May 1873, at 88 years of age, from the effects of a fall he suffered leaving the church of San Fedele. On the first anniversary of his death, in 1874, Milan honored him in the church of San Marco with the Requiem Mass Giuseppe Verdi wrote especially for the occasion.

Three editions for a single novel

The Betrothed did not reach the form everyone knows in a single pass. The first draft, written between 1821 and 1823, is titled Fermo e Lucia: it was never published during Manzoni’s lifetime, and the male lead is still called Fermo, not Renzo. It was followed by the “Ventisettana,” published in three volumes between 1825 and 1827 under the definitive title: this is where the name Renzo first appears, though the language still carries strong Lombard traits. The complete, single-volume edition came out in 1827. Manzoni then extensively revised the language into the “Quarantana,” published between 1840 and 1842, which became the standard reference text used in schools and modern editions.

Edition	Years	Language	Audience
Fermo e Lucia	1821-1823	Still unpolished, never published	Nobody, remained a manuscript
Ventisettana	1825-1827	With strong Lombard traits	Milan and Lombardy
Quarantana	1840-1842	Cultured Florentine, after the rinsing in the Arno	All of Italy

After the Ventisettana was published, in 1827 Manzoni traveled to Florence specifically to submit the novel to a language revision that would align it with the cultured Florentine actually spoken there, not just written. The real work began in the summer of 1839, with the help of Emilia Luti, a Florentine housekeeper for the D’Azeglio family. On copies of the Quarantana, Manzoni left a handwritten dedication that gave the whole operation its name:

Practical example: on copies of the Quarantana, Manzoni wrote this dedication by hand: “Madamigella Emilia Luti gradisca questi cenci da Lei risciacquati in Arno, che Le offre, con affettuosa riconoscenza, l’autore” — roughly, “Miss Emilia Luti, please accept these rags rinsed by you in the Arno, offered to you, with grateful affection, by the author.” The “rags” are the pages of the novel; the Arno is Florence’s river. It is an elegant way of saying that the text had been scrubbed, word by word, of the Lombard traits that marked it as the work of a Milanese writer.

The result was not a surface polish: Manzoni systematically removed the lexical and grammatical Lombardisms that filled the Ventisettana. With the first edition he had addressed a Milanese audience; with the Quarantana he carried out his plan of speaking to a national Italian audience, at a time when a common, actually spoken Italian language barely existed.

The plot, between love and bullying

The story is set in Spanish-ruled Lombardy between 1628 and 1630, in a landscape at the foot of the Alps worn down by the Thirty Years’ War, famine and, finally, plague. Renzo and Lucia are two young commoners, silk spinners, preparing for their wedding. Standing in their way is Don Rodrigo, a local tyrant who desires Lucia: he sends his thugs to threaten Don Abbondio, the village priest, so that he will not perform the ceremony. Out of cowardice, Don Abbondio backs down.

Renzo and Lucia then attempt a surprise wedding, which fails, and are forced to flee separately with the help of Fra Cristoforo, a friar who openly opposes Don Rodrigo. Lucia is kidnapped by the Unnamed at Don Rodrigo’s instigation, and later, during the 1630 plague of Milan, falls ill. At the city’s Lazzaretto, she is reconciled with a dying Don Rodrigo; only then can Renzo and Lucia finally marry.

Manzoni takes a familiar plot, two lovers kept apart by an obstacle, and turns it into a rough but ultimately rewarding path toward peace and happiness, grounded in genuine moral values, one that uncovers the hypocrisy and conformism of the society of the time. For this reason the novel is considered the historical novel par excellence of Italian literature, rather than a coming-of-age story: even as it follows the two protagonists’ growth, the book’s center of gravity remains the reconstruction of seventeenth-century Lombardy and its moral judgment on society, more than the inner psychological development of the characters.

History and fiction, the Unnamed and the Nun of Monza

Several characters in the novel are not pure invention. For the Unnamed, the feudal lord who kidnaps Lucia at Don Rodrigo’s instigation, critics point to Francesco Bernardino Visconti as a possible model, a feudal lord of Brignano Ghiaradadda: an edict of Milan’s governor declared him a bandit chief in 1603. Manzoni descended from this family on his mother’s side. Some details passed down by the seventeenth-century chronicler Giuseppe Ripamonti, a contemporary of the events, would rule out Francesco Bernardino as an exact model, in particular because he never married: the historian Giulio Scotti has proposed the alternative of his brother, Galeazzo Maria Visconti, who was also involved in criminal activity.

In the novel, the Unnamed first reacts with irritation, then regrets what he did to Lucia and spends a night of remorse; the next morning, hearing the bells that announce Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s arrival, he goes to confess to him, and later helps him bring Lucia back to her mother. Federico Borromeo, a cousin of St Charles Borromeo, became Archbishop of Milan in 1595, at the age of 31; in 1609 he founded the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, sending eight emissaries across Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Flanders, Greece, Lebanon and Jerusalem to gather books and manuscripts, building a collection of some 30,000 printed volumes and 14,000 manuscripts; during the 1630 plague he distinguished himself for his zeal and charity.

The Nun of Monza, Gertrude, also has a historical model: Marianna de Leyva, born in Milan in 1575 and dead in 1650, daughter of the Count of Monza. Orphaned of her mother at a young age, she was steered toward a religious career by her father and paternal aunt, and entered the monastery of Santa Margherita in Monza at thirteen. She remained confined there for about 14 years, until 1622, when Archbishop Federico Borromeo, after conversations in which he assessed her repentance, arranged for her release and gave her the task of writing letters of comfort to nuns uncertain of their vocation. The records of the trial that concerned her were made public only in 1957, more than a century after the novel was published: Manzoni knew the story only through oral tradition, and in the novel he gives Gertrude a weaker character than the historical Marianna, with her forced monastic vows imposed by her parents even more starkly.

The plague of Milan, 1630

In the novel, the plague arrives to close a cycle of disasters already opened by war and famine. Milan had about 250,000 residents at the start of the epidemic, between 1629 and 1630; estimates of the dead vary widely depending on the historical source, from roughly 140,000 to over 180,000 victims. The seventeenth-century chronicler Giuseppe Ripamonti, author of “La peste di Milano del 1630” and a primary source used by Manzoni himself, records 50,000 people who passed through the city’s Lazzaretto during the epidemic; the Tribunale della Sanità instead reported 100,000, a discrepancy that shows how hard it is for historians to settle on a firm number. The Lazzaretto stood in the area now covered by via San Gregorio, via Lazzaretto and corso Buenos Aires.

Tied to this episode is also “Storia della colonna infame” (The Column of Infamy), the historiographical appendix Manzoni attached to the definitive edition of 1840. Drawing on Pietro Verri’s “Osservazioni sulla tortura,” it recounts the trial against the men accused of deliberately spreading the plague, Guglielmo Piazza and Giangiacomo Mora, tortured and put to death in Milan in 1630. Manzoni worked on it with renewed commitment from 1839, after leaving it out of the 1827 edition for editorial timing reasons, even though the text had already been planned as a digression as far back as Fermo e Lucia.

A Florentine for all of Italy

The Quarantana’s language project should be read alongside a figure that still surprises: according to linguist Tullio De Mauro’s estimate, at the time of Italian unification, in 1861, only 2.5% of the population was able to speak Italian. That estimate is made up of about 1% with an education beyond elementary school, plus roughly 1.5% of Tuscans or Romans who had the language for geographic reasons; the first census of the Kingdom of Italy, in the same year, recorded that over 78% of the population was illiterate. An alternative, higher estimate also exists, proposed by linguist Arrigo Castellani, which would put the share of Italian speakers at around 10%.

In a country linguistically fragmented into dialects, the Quarantana, written in a cultured, actually spoken Florentine, was taken as a model for the national language, contributing, together with compulsory post-unification schooling and later television, to the spread of the standard Italian spoken across the country over the following century. It was not the first time a literary work had played that role: centuries earlier, Dante’s Divine Comedy had helped give literary dignity to the Florentine vernacular, in an Italy just as divided into a thousand dialects back then.

A telescope on history

The definitive novel runs to 38 chapters, grouped into four sections of roughly equal length, in a structure critics describe as a “telescope”: it opens on a narrow view, the village of Renzo and Lucia, and gradually widens to include historical events of European scale, such as the Thirty Years’ War, famine and plague. The first eight chapters, the so-called “village section,” cover a narrative concentrated into just four days. The main digressions concern the story of the Unnamed, between chapters 18 and 19, the famine, the war and the plague, between chapters 28 and 32, and the story of Gertrude, between the end of chapter 9 and the end of chapter 10.

Manzoni opens the novel with a precise narrative device: in his Introduction, he pretends to have found and transcribed an anonymous seventeenth-century manuscript, written in a baroque, convoluted language that he claims to be “modernizing” for the reader. It is the literary topos of the “found manuscript,” which lets him take ironic distance from his own sources and step into the story as a commentator. The famous opening line, “Quel ramo del lago di Como…” (“That branch of the lake of Como…”), describes the Lecco branch of the lake, the place where Manzoni spent his childhood and adolescence, since his family had a villa at Caleotto, near Lecco: a setting chosen precisely because of the author’s firsthand knowledge of it.

The novel won over readers at once and became a patriotic symbol for Italians during the nationalist Risorgimento period, going on to serve as a model for many later Italian writers. In English translation, the title was first rendered as “The Betrothed Lovers,” and later, more commonly, as “The Betrothed.” Born in a village on the Lecco branch of Lake Como, the novel became a piece of the shared language of an entire country. Few other books in Italian literary history have left as deep a mark on the language and imagination of their readers.