Alessandro Manzoni

Vocation

Notable

Italian poet and novelist whose novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827) had immense patriotic appeal for Italians of the nationalistic Risorgimento period and is generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. In 1808 Manzoni married Henriette Blondel, a Calvinist, who soon converted to Roman Catholicism, and two years later Manzoni himself returned to Catholicism. Retiring to a quiet life in Milan and at his villa in Brusiglio, he wrote (1812–15) a series of religious poems, on the church feasts of Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter, and a hymn to Mary. During these years, Manzoni also produced the treatise Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (1819; “Observations on Catholic Ethics”); an ode on the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, “Marzo 1821”; and two historical tragedies influenced by Shakespeare. An ode, written on the death of Napoleon in 1821, “Il cinque maggio” (1822; “The Napoleonic Ode”), was considered by Goethe, one of the first to translate it into German, as the greatest of many written to commemorate the event. Manzoni’s masterpiece, I promessi sposi, 3 vol. (1825–27), is a novel set in early 17th-century Lombardy during the period of the Milanese insurrection, the Thirty Years’ War, and the plague. Manzoni’s wife died in 1833; his second wife and most of his children also predeceased him. These calamities deepened rather than destroyed his faith. Revered by the men of his time, he was made a senator of Italy in 1860. A stroke followed the death of his oldest son in 1873, and he died on 22 May 1873, Milan. Link to Wikipedia biography