Alessandro Manzoni

Alessandro Manzoni was an Italian poet, dramatist, and novelist whose work helped shape a modern national prose style. The Betrothed, originally I promessi sposi, places Renzo and Lucia in seventeenth-century Lombardy, where private hopes are repeatedly redirected by political power, social hierarchy, famine, and plague. The novel first appeared in the 1820s, after which Manzoni extensively revised its language for the definitive edition of the early 1840s. That sustained revision joined literary craft to his concern with a broadly shared Italian language. The Betrothed remains his defining work and a central historical novel in Italian literature.