THE BETROTHED by Alessandro Manzoni (1827) translated by Bruce Penman (1972)
Recently I got around to reading an old paperback copy of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. I picked it up years ago because I read somewhere that it is a classic greatly beloved by Italians—much as The Pickwick Papers is beloved by the English and The Three Musketeers by the French.
The setting is northern Italy, around the end of the 16th century. It is about the misadventures of Renzo, a good-hearted but foolish young workman, and his sweetheart, Lucia.
I enjoyed it. The author was a good storyteller and also a witty observer of the foibles of human nature.
I also liked it because it gave me a glimpse of another time and place. This helps remind me that today’s crises are not uniquely bad and that the way I and my friends see the world is not the peak of human wisdom.
Renzo and Lucia are eager to marry, but the local parish priest, Don Abbondio, keeps putting them off because he is afraid of the wicked local nobleman, Don Rodrigo, who has designs on Lucia.
The two sweethearts flee, with the help of another Catholic clergyman, the Capuchin monk Father Cristoforo. The two become separated, and Lucia takes refuge in the convent of the notorious Nun of Monza.
The Nun of Monza was a real person. She was a member of an aristocratic family, pressured to take vows as a nun, more or less against her will, for dynastic and inheritance reasons.
As a nun, she lived a life of luxury and self-indulgence. She look a lover, gave birth to a stillborn child and murdered a nun who threatened to tell about it. But, in the novel, she takes a liking to Lucia.
Then Lucia falls into the clutches of an even more powerful and evil nobleman, the Unnamed. He supposedly was so terrifying and ferocious that nobody, in his lifetime or after, dared refer to him by his real name—something like Voldemort in the Harry Potter series. He also was a real person, although his name, Francesco Bernadino Visconti, is known to history.
Renzo meanwhile finds himself in Milan, where riots are going on because of a shortage of bread. Manzoni observes that the authorities think they can increase the supply of bread by holding down the price, while the street mob’s solution is to burn down bakeries.
Our hero shoots off his mouth, and a police spy decides to finger him as the ringleader of the riots.
Renzo is arrested, but gets away. Lucia is freed because of the intervention of the saintly Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Frederigo Borromeo. He, too, was a real person, the first cousin of St. Charles Borromeo.
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