The Betrothed

In seventeenth-century Lombardy, two young peasants, Renzo and Lucia, want only to marry, but a cowardly priest bullied by a local tyrant refuses to perform the ceremony. What follows scatters them across a country wracked by famine, riot, war, and plague, as Lucia is pursued by a powerful nobleman and Renzo blunders through a Milan on the edge of chaos. Manzoni turned this suspenseful tale of ordinary people into the founding novel of modern Italian literature, shaping the very language later Italians would read and speak. Its account of the 1630 Milan plague remains one of the most vivid ever written. First published in 1827, it endures as a national classic. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings the full story to English readers.