Italy’s Great Historical Novel

By Joan Acocella
October 10, 2022

Henry James decried the nineteenth century’s “loose baggy monsters,” but a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” demonstrates the genre’s power.

A painting of a woman.

Manzoni’s tale of love and political oppression galvanized the Italy of his time.

Photograph by Molteni & Motta / Universal Images Group / Getty

A few years ago, reading the introduction to an English-language version of Hugo’s “Les Misérables,” I found the translator, Norman Denny, confessing that he had made a number of cuts in the French text. Certain of them, he said, were for sense. But others, he was not ashamed to say, were due to his feeling that the book was just too long-winded. The great Frenchman couldn’t shut up. He told us things twice, three times. Or he said them too many times the first time. “It is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun,” Denny noted, with wonder. Even after the trims, his version is still more than twelve hundred pages long.

This fullness, overfullness, was endemic to the genre to which “Les Misérables” belonged, the nineteenth-century historical novel, a form that was immensely popular in its day. It recorded sweeping changes: kingdoms rose and fell, peoples were enslaved or freed. For great events, great language was needed. But, from what I can tell, even readers of that time occasionally grew tired of the grandiloquence, and when they did they were not afraid to skip. Likewise their children and grandchildren. A friend of mine told me that once, when he was talking to a group of Russian-literature professors, he confided to them that he and his American colleagues often had difficulty with the many highly detailed accounts of battles in “War and Peace.” Oh, the Russians answered, we skip those parts! So boring! You should skip them, too, they said.

Americans are unlikely to take that advice. Modernism taught us not to. A work of literature was what it was. You didn’t toss out the parts you didn’t like. The assumption was that the author had already pared his novel or poem down to its bare bones, every word of which was essential to the true picture. Ironically, this way of thinking may have emboldened some people to avoid the big books altogether. In recent years, some celebrated writers have come clean about which fat masterpieces they have never read. Jonathan Franzen told a journalist that he had never got past page 50 of “Moby-Dick.” Others have said that they have not read “Vanity Fair,” or “David Copperfield,” and didn’t intend to. I have never heard a modern novelist say that he has not read Joyce’s “Ulysses”—there are limits—but I’ll bet that such a one is lurking out there, waiting to strike.

A writer who belongs at the center of this story is Henry James. On first acquaintance—with his late novels, in any case—he may seem one of those fog-bound fellows whom younger writers feel they no longer have to bend the knee to. In fact, however dense the surface of his texts, James is the captain of the opposing team, the non-meanderers. That is the debate, really. At bottom, it’s not about length but about whether it’s O.K. for the novelist, having dealt with his story from one angle, to wander off and then come back to it from a different angle. In the mind of your typical nineteenth-century historical novelist, this is obviously O.K. He’s a great writer, so why should anyone object if he interrupts his story to give us a lesson on the whiteness of the whale or the succession wars in northern Italy in the seventeenth century? He’ll come back to the main story. What’s the problem?

According to James, the problem was that this was not art. It was basically a picture without “composition,” by which he meant selection, focus. “A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty,” James wrote. “There may, in its absence, be life, incontestably, as ‘The Newcomes’ has life, as ‘Les Trois Mousquetaires,’ as Tolstoi’s ‘Peace and War’ have it; but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary artistically mean? We have heard it maintained . . . that such things are ‘superior to art’; but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us.” The phrase “loose baggy monsters” has since entered the lexicon of critical vituperation, and the list of indicted books can be expanded well beyond James’s count. Sir Walter Scott was certainly the elephant in this room, accompanied by Balzac, and James Fenimore Cooper. Apropos of the last, a certain corniness—more than the nineteenth-century average—is often to be found in historical novels of the period. For that reason, as well as for the length problem, most of them have suffered a severe drop in popularity. Yet some are still regarded as classics, and others are revived now and then. Last month, the Modern Library added to its list “The Betrothed” (“I Promessi Sposi”), from 1842, by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, in a new translation—the first in fifty years—by Michael F. Moore.

In some respects, this is a curious choice. Most readers outside Italy will not have heard of the title, or even of the author. In Italy, the book is considered a pillar of the national literature, perhaps second only to the Divine Comedy. It has gone into more than five hundred Italian editions, and it is a fixture in schools, where it is studied in tenth grade. In its day, the novel was famous across Europe, and it’s not clear why its reputation ceased to be an international one—why people who know of Dumas or Hugo, even if they haven’t read them, aren’t even aware of Manzoni’s existence. Moore, in his introduction, mentions speculation that the novel is too Italian (for instance, in its preoccupation with the Catholic Church) to travel well. In any case, the Modern Library is right: it is time for the situation to change. “The Betrothed” emerges in the new translation as a work that anyone who cares about nineteenth-century fiction should want to read. It has the great events—war, famine, plague—and the record of their impact on humble people. It has the sentimentality: demure maidens and brave lads and black-hearted villains. It has passages of lyrical description and passages where the specificity of detail verges on the sociological. It has the prolixity, annoying to some, comforting to others. In other words, it is an exemplary historical novel.

Alessandro Manzoni, the child of a genteel Lombard family, lived from 1785 to 1873—that is, through the political turmoil stretching from the French Revolution through the Italian Risorgimento. His lively mother, Giulia Beccaria, was prevented from marrying the man she loved (his family was richer than hers), and so, at the age of twenty, she was forced to marry an older man, Don Pietro Manzoni, who lived with his seven unwed sisters and reportedly cared for little beyond the supervision of his estates. He also, according to one report, had no testicles. Alessandro was born soon afterward, and, in the words of his biographer Archibald Colquhoun, the evidence that he was the son not of Don Pietro but of Giulia’s lover is “as conclusive as gossip can make it.” When Alessandro was six, Giulia finally got a legal separation from Don Pietro and took off for Paris with yet another man. The boy’s childhood was spent first with a wet nurse and later at a number of boarding schools in Switzerland and Italy. Giulia visited him occasionally, if she was passing through. She didn’t come often, though.

According to Colquhoun, Manzoni’s adult life was uneventful, “deceptively like that of many of his class and period: a background of solid squirearchy, youthful revolutionary enthusiasms apparently stilled by re-conversion to Catholicism, a little mild political activity, then long years of studious retirement, country pursuits, and rather melancholy family life.” At twenty-three, he married a sixteen-year-old Swiss girl, Enrichetta Blondel, a Calvinist—a scandalous choice in the Milan of the time. The sons that Enrichetta bore him were so badly behaved, it is said, that for a while he was reluctant to show his face in Milan, Lombardy’s capital. That problem was alleviated, in time, by his offspring’s propensity for dying young. Of the ten children, all but two predeceased him. Furthermore, he was plagued all his life by what Colquhoun calls nervous troubles: “He hated meeting new people, was terrified of crowds. . . . He could never go out alone, and felt voids opening up before him when he had to cross a street. Stories are told of his ordering servants to drive away birds in the trees under his windows, of his weighing his clothes several times a day.”

He thought of himself as a writer, if anything, and in his early years he produced some poems and essays and two verse tragedies—on Lombard themes, prophetically—but he had difficulty putting pen to paper and would leave his desk on any pretext, sometimes for long periods. Finally, however, Italy’s great political cause of the nineteenth century—the Risorgimento, the conversion of the peninsula from a nice kitchen garden for French, Spanish, and Austrian invaders to a single, united nation—galvanized him, and he began a novel in the service of that ideal. “The Betrothed” took place not in the nineteenth century but, rather, in the seventeenth, a terrible time, the period of the Thirty Years’ War and of resurgent bubonic plague. This permitted Manzoni to make his book more sensational and exotic. (The men wear those floppy-cuffed seventeenth-century boots, like Puss in Boots.) It also, by relieving him of the temptation to allude to people in power in his time, kept him out of jail.

Chapter 1 opens like a flower:

The branch of Lake Como that turns south between two unbroken mountain chains, bordered by coves and inlets that echo the furrowed slopes, suddenly narrows to take the flow and shape of a river, between a promontory on the right and a wide shoreline on the opposite side. The bridge that joins the two sides at this point seems to make this transformation even more visible to the eye and mark the spot where the lake ends and the Adda begins again, to reclaim the name lake where the shores, newly distant, allow the water to spread and slowly pool into fresh inlets and coves.

Not only does the water pool and flow, so does the language, and the scene is made more dazzling by the clear indication that we are looking at the lake from high above. It is all laid out at our feet: God’s world on the seventh day (tellingly) of November, 1628.

The first person we meet is a parish priest, Don Abbondio, reading his breviary as he takes his evening walk. Suddenly, the peace is broken. As Don Abbondio turns a bend in the road, he finds two men who have obviously been waiting for him. As he knows from their clothing and their manners, they are bravi, or hoodlums, enforcers. “Reverend Father,” one of them asks, “is it your intention to marry Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella tomorrow?” Renzo and Lucia are the betrothed of the book’s title, two young people from Don Abbondio’s town whom he has indeed agreed to marry the next day, since there is nothing to prevent this—except what Don Abbondio now learns from the bravi: that Lucia has caught the eye of a local Spanish lord, Don Rodrigo, and he intends to have her for himself. (For a while, at least; there’s no mention of marriage.) Don Abbondio is not a courageous man. “My good sirs,” he pleads. “You are men of the world. You know perfectly well how these matters go. The poor priest has nothing to do with it!” The bravi let him off with a warning, and he skitters home. The next day, he tells Renzo what the situation is, and that he can do nothing about it.

Renzo, filled with fiery purpose, and suspecting that the making of such impediments to a Christian marriage is forbidden by law, goes to a lawyer, who assures him that, yes, the law is on his side—as long, the lawyer adds, as the complainant has done nothing to interfere with the interests of a person of standing. Uh-oh. Here’s how Manzoni explains the functioning of the law in northern Italy in the seventeenth century:

In those days, nothing could be worse than to be an animal without claws or teeth yet no inclination to be devoured. The police did nothing to protect the law-abiding, inoffensive man who had no means to intimidate others. Not that there was any lack of laws and punishments against acts of personal aggression: Indeed, there was an overabundance of them. The crimes were enumerated and defined at tedious, meticulous length. The punishments were wildly exorbitant. As if that were not enough, in every case they could be increased, at will, by the Governor himself and by one hundred officers of the law. Trials were designed solely to free the judge from any impediment to passing sentence.

And the law was always in favor of whoever had more power or influence or money. The system was corrupt from top to bottom. Renzo does not know this, and he leaves the lawyer’s office still clinging to the hope that the law will protect him: “He kept repeating to himself the same strange words. ‘In the end there is justice in the world. . . .’ For a man overcome with grief truly does not understand what he is saying.”

In Renzo and Lucia’s village, worse trouble is brewing. Peasants in the fields “were sowing seed parsimoniously, sparely, begrudgingly, as if they were risking something they cared about deeply. . . . A scrawny girl, leading an emaciated cow by a rope while it grazed, took a look around and then stooped down quickly to steal some herbs to feed her family, having learned from hunger that men, too, can subsist on grass.” Famine is coming to Lombardy. It is this kind of quick, concrete detail, the girl’s dipping down and then straightening up again, to avoid being caught filching a few leaves for her family’s polenta, that gives us relief from Manzoni’s expository prose.

But Renzo and Lucia are young and in love, and they want to try their chances. For the rest of the book, they are basically on the lam, sometimes helped, sometimes hurt, by the people they meet along the way. This structural principle produces a lot of adventures, and the adventures’ adventures. I will be as brief as possible, but you can’t really get a sense of this book, or yield to what is good in it, without consenting to be bored now and then by its ever-ramifying plot.

The first job for Manzoni is to get Lucia out of reach of Don Rodrigo and any other Spanish rapists in the territory. This is accomplished, not without difficulty, but finally we see her settled in a convent, doing her needlework. Unfortunately, this convent is directed by a shady character, Sister Gertrude (based on a notorious historical figure spookily known as the Nun of Monza). Gertrude never sought a cloistered life. She was forced into it by her father, as a means of safeguarding primogeniture. Annoyed with her position, Gertrude has an affair with a servant boy. Her father is informed of this and forces her to take the veil. Nun or not, she soon embarks on a new erotic entanglement, with a “young man, a criminal by trade,” named Egidio. This is suspected by one of the lay sisters in the convent, so Gertrude and Egidio murder the woman and bury her somewhere nearby.

Back to Renzo. He, brave boy, goes to Milan, where he finds himself in the middle of food riots, because of the famine. He helps save an official from being lynched by a hungry mob, but, in the process, attracts the attention of a police agent, who proceeds to march him to prison. En route, he escapes and takes off, on foot, to Bergamo, out of Milanese jurisdiction and hence beyond the powers seeking his imprisonment. Also, he has a cousin in Bergamo, who will give him a job.

Back to the convent. With the help of a diabolically evil strongman—he is called the Nameless One (l’Innominato), because no one dares speak his name—Don Rodrigo has hatched a plot to kidnap Lucia. While on an errand in town, she is seized by the Nameless One’s men, taken to his castle, and locked in a room. But in the course of the struggle something strange happens. The Nameless One sees Lucia and suddenly begins to suffer for the sins he has committed in the past. As it happens, a famous churchman, Cardinal Federigo Borromeo (an actual figure of the period), is preaching nearby. The Nameless One goes to see him, and the archbishop greets him with a stern reproach for his evil life. The Nameless One weeps and repents. His first act of contrition is to return to his castle, gather up Lucia, and pack her off to her village, which, however, is soon ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War.

Lucia and Renzo are finally reunited in Milan, which is now in the grip of the bubonic plague of 1630. In Western fiction, there are a number of celebrated descriptions of plague: Boccaccio, Defoe, Camus, Marguerite Yourcenar. Manzoni’s, based on an eyewitness account, is a close cousin of those. At first, the citizens deny the plague’s existence, and hurl abuse—indeed, stones—at people who claim that it is real. (One thinks of Dr. Fauci.) Manzoni shows us the smoke that fills Milan’s air as people burn their clothes and their bedding. Corpses litter the streets and spill out of the mass graves in the cemetery. Renzo, crossing the city, stops to let a cart go by. Two horses, pulling it, struggle to move forward, “straining their necks and digging in their hooves” while men at their sides urge them on “with lashes, punches, and curses.” As for the load these horses are carrying: “Most of the corpses were naked, though some were loosely covered in rags. They were piled high and jumbled together, like a nest of snakes slowly uncoiling in the warmth of spring. At every jolt, every bump in the road, the tragic heap shook and came apart grotesquely. Heads dangled, maidens’ braids unraveled, and arms slid out of the tangled mass of limbs to bang against the wheels.” You feel sorrier for the horses than for the people: the people are out of their misery at least. But Renzo is transfixed by the sight of the bodies. Could Lucia be in that pile?

He eventually arrives at the lazaretto, or quarantine area, filled with the dying and those ministering to them, including many Capuchin friars. (According to Manzoni, most of the friars died, as did two-thirds of the population of Milan.) The lazaretto has a fenced-off area for women and, within it, a place where the babies of dead mothers are cared for, with wet nurses, and also nanny goats, giving suck to the children. It is in the domestic setting of the women’s quarters, appropriately, that Renzo at last finds Lucia. “Oh, Renzo!” she cries. “Why did you come here?” “You’re asking why I came?” Renzo says. “Do I have to tell you? Am I not Renzo? Are you not Lucia? . . . Are we no longer ourselves? Do you no longer remember what we were denied?”

The problem here is that Lucia, when she was imprisoned in the castle of the Nameless One, made a vow to the Virgin Mary that if she could be released from this humiliation she would renounce her love for Renzo and die a virgin. Fortunately, there is a wise friar at hand in the lazaretto, and he releases Lucia from her vow. She and Renzo, who had once planned to marry the next day, are only now, two years later, allowed to take their vows.The ending is sentimental: “ ‘Oh Lord!’ exclaimed Lucia in anguish, clasping her hands together and looking up at the sky.” It is also genuinely affecting. These two people have been through a lot. They both seem older than they were at the start. I cried.

Part of the pleasure of reading “The Betrothed” comes simply from its romanticism, its sweep and danger and excitement: great, gloomy castles jutting over perilous abysses, pious maidens being abducted by unrepentant villains, murderous nuns. It should be remembered, though, that that style, those tropes, were the product of the politics of the nineteenth century, and of centuries of quarrels among, variously, Spain, France, the Austrian Empire as to which of them—forget the Italians—should harvest Italy’s grapes. And this dispute was part of a larger, pan-European one: Would the people of the West remain faithful to the Church—that is, to belief—or would they sign on to the Enlightenment, that cold eighteenth-century idea that we should examine things, even ask for concrete evidence, before deciding what the world was about? Most of the good deeds, and a number of the bad deeds, in “The Betrothed” are committed by clergy. But on the most pressing political issue in the book, and in nineteenth-century Italy—the unification of the peninsula—Manzoni’s mind was made up early, and he is cherished by Italians as much for his work as a patriot as for his literary skill.

Manzoni was a philologist of sorts—he wrote essays on language—and he deplored the ragbag nature of his native tongue. Because, in his time, Italians mostly stayed close to home and were ruled by foreigners, they barely had a native tongue; the peninsula was a patchwork of mutually unintelligible dialects. Manzoni said that his own writing was an “undigested mixture of sentences that are a little Lombard, a little Tuscan, a little French, and even a little Latin; and also of sentences that do not belong to any of these categories.” In the first edition of “The Betrothed,” published in three volumes from 1825 to 1827, he tried hard, with the help of dictionaries and learned friends, to write a purer Italian—which to him meant the Tuscan dialect, the language of Dante. This edition was an immediate success, but Manzoni wasn’t satisfied with it. He was ashamed of the Milanese and other Lombard usages still defacing his text, as he saw it, so he sat down and for the next thirteen years painstakingly revised the novel, effectively translating his own book—even moving to Florence for a while, to be able to command the cadences of Florentine Tuscan. This revision, which then appeared in ninety-six installments between 1840 and 1842, is what Italians read today and what Michael F. Moore has translated for the Modern Library.

So “The Betrothed” was the product of two decades of work, and it feels like it. Almost everything in the world seems to have been stuffed into it. There are endless escapes, reversals, confessions, abductions. No sooner do we meet a new character than Manzoni feels he must give us that person’s backstory. (Sister Gertrude’s requires thirty pages.) Late in the book, meeting an unimportant character, Don Ferrante, we are told that he is an erudite man, with a library of almost three hundred books. “Oh, no!” we say, and, sure enough, we get a very long account of what Don Ferrante likes to study: history, politics, chivalry, sorcery, natural philosophy (science), regular philosophy. We find out what he thinks about Aristotle, and about Aristotle’s detractors. “I am starting to wonder,” Manzoni finally says, “whether the reader really wants to hear any more of this catalogue.” Well might he ask.

But “The Betrothed” is not just a novel. Its weakest component is its plot, or the plot’s organization. A lot of its psychology isn’t too strong, either. Under the influence of early-twentieth-century commentators such as Henry James and E. M. Forster, we, too, may believe that those things are the most important elements of a novel. “The Betrothed,” however true to its time, is closer to an opera, crammed with solos, duets, choruses, and lyric passages that, from what we can tell, are there more for art’s sake than for the sake of anything else. Here is Renzo returning to his village, after being away for years, and looking upon his vineyard, despoiled by war:

Everything had been pulled up by the roots or roughly chopped down: grape vines, mulberries, and fruit trees of every kind. You could still see the vestiges of the old plantings through new growth in crooked lines where there used to be straight rows. Here and there fresh twigs or shoots sprouted from mulberry, fig, peach, cherry, and plum trees. But even they were crowded out by a dense variety of new growth that had germinated and flourished, untended by human hands. There was a riot of nettles, ferns, ryegrass, scutch, goosefoot, wild oat, green amaranth, chicory, sorrel, cockspur, and the like, otherwise known as weeds by farmers throughout the world. . . .

Amid this riot of vegetation, certain plants stood out more prominently and conspicuously than others, though they were no better, or at least, not most of them. The tallest was pokeweed, with its reddish outstretched branches and majestic dark-green leaves, some of which already had purple edges and dangling bunches of berries, which ranged in color from deep purple on the bottom to violet then green, with tiny white blossoms on the tip. The large woolly leaves of the mullein were on the ground while its stem was in the air, its tall spikes spattered and speckled with bright yellow flowers. Then there was the thistle’s prickly stems, leaves, and calyx, with tufts of white and purple flowers blooming or silvery-gray plumes breaking off and blowing away in the wind. In one spot, a clump of wild morning glories had climbed and wrapped itself around the shoots of a mulberry tree, covering it with their drooping leaves and dangling white trumpet flowers. In another, a bryony, with its red berries, had wound itself tightly around the fresh shoots of a grapevine, which, after searching in vain for a more solid support, had wrapped its own tendrils around the bryony in turn.

If you take twenty years to write a novel, and are very gifted, you might be able to produce something of this kind. The passage is amazing not just for its richness but also for its swelling symbolism: the ruin and destruction combined with, and eventually overshadowed by, the new growth—that is, hope. The description didn’t have to be this long (and I have cut it). We didn’t have to know about the scutch and the goosefoot; the pokeweed and the bryony would have been enough. But Manzoni did it for himself, and for Italy. Also, perhaps, for his nineteenth-century readers, who, after all, were not Henry James, and who prized color and quantity. People were short of entertainment in those days and, having paid their money, wanted a nice long show. More, please. It should also be said that a book being published in installments might require some repetition. The “art TV” of recent years often starts with recaps. If Manzoni feels we need reminding that Sister Gertrude is a rather sinister character, and therefore gives her not one lover but two, should we be surprised?

After “The Betrothed” Manzoni lived thirty more years, but he never wrote another novel. He almost didn’t have to. To the Italians, he was a national hero. Italy’s new king made him a senator, and he became an influential contributor to the task of forging a national language—the cause that had shaped so much of the novel’s composition. He was eighty-eight when he died, in May of 1873, and his body lay in state for several days in Milan. At his funeral, government ministers, princes, and a future king of Italy followed his coffin from the Duomo to the cemetery. Giuseppe Verdi, who so admired Manzoni that he recalled wanting to kneel when he got to meet him, was too grieved to attend. Instead, he set to work on his Requiem, which was dedicated to Manzoni’s memory and premièred on the first anniversary of his death. Verdi’s composition is now far more widely known than Manzoni’s novel, but it is not more heartfelt. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 17, 2022, issue, with the headline “National Treasure.”