Allesandro Manzoni’s ‘Betrothed’ is the ‘national novel’ of Italy. Every school child in Italy is familiar with the work and in the words of Bruce Penman whose translation I read:
If Dickens had written only one novel, and there had been no Fielding or Thackeray; if his novel had foreshadowed the theme of a successful national liberation movement and had had a profound, lasting and beneficial effect on the English language; then we would have a book that would stand out in our literature in the same way that The Betrothed does in Italy.
When Manzoni published the book between 1825 and ’27, there was no ‘single’ Italian language. People spoke regional dialects rather than “Italian,” and although a literary Italian existed, it was archaic and largely disconnected from everyday speech. The Milanese spoke Lombard, Neapolitans spoke Neapolitan, and Florentines spoke Tuscan. Manzoni rewrote the book choosing Tuscan-based Italian because he understood that a national novel required a ‘national’ language. Florentine Tuscan also carried immense cultural authority as the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
The plague of the 17th century that wiped away 30% of Milan’s population is graphically referenced in the book. The most searing passage was one in which Renzo comes across a shelter where babies who lost their mothers to the plague were nursed by goats:
Wet-nurses and other women were looking after them; but the goats were what caught and held the eye most of all: nanny goats mingling among the women, and serving as their assistants. It was a refuge for innocents, such as the time and the place could afford. But it was a strange thing to see one of those beasts standing over a baby and giving him her teat, and another run off in response to a hungry wail, as if prompted by a truly maternal instinct, and stop by her little foster-child and try to get into the right position for him, bleating and wriggling as if to call someone to come and help both of them.
Jhumpa Lahiri (who has published three works in Italian, a language she learnt as an adult) has a wonderfully evocative introduction to the 2022 edition of Betrothed translated by Micheal Moore (the version I now wish I had read):
I attended my first Italian wedding in the seaside town of Sestri Levante, on the Ligurian coast. The bride, who lived in Brooklyn in those days, as I did, was my Italian tutor. Her family hosted us warmly, and on the last day we spent together, before my own family and I were headed back to the airport in Genoa, they organized a final, intimate lunch with the newlyweds. In the affectionate confusion of saying goodbyes, the bride’s mother ran into a bookstore and placed a tome in my hands. It was a paperback copy of I promessi sposi. Given that her daughter was teaching me Italian, she must have felt inspired to introduce me to Italy’s most celebrated novel—all 582 pages of it—in its original form. I was touched by her faith in me. Back then, I considered reading and understanding a short story in Italian a major accomplishment. That was in August of 2010. Ten years would pass before I opened the book, one cold January day in Princeton, New Jersey, and devoured it to the end in a burst of unabated enthusiasm.
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