Anyone who planned to compile a plague anthology during the Covid pandemic must have turned to Alessandro Manzoni’s masterly historical novel I promessi sposi (literally “The betrothed couple”), written between 1821 and 1842, in which five chapters recreate the experience of bubonic plague in Milan in 1630. Manzoni conjures up the bumbling bureaucracy (the authorities broke their own rules), the claustrophobia, the silence, the little bell of the monatti (corpse carriers), the fear and hysteria, the stench, the looting, the teeming lazzaretto (isolation hospital), the humbling of the mighty and the rampant urban myths. The whole work – Manzoni’s only novel – is informed by deep historical research and a dedication to reality and truth.

Appearing a century after Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, and today revered as the greatest Italian novel, this was one of Italy’s first: in previous centuries long narratives had normally been in verse. Writing in the 1955 preface to his classic translation (of 1951), Archibald Colquhoun asserted that “for Italy it is all Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray rolled into one volume; though … its spirit is perhaps nearer Tolstoy”. As to its reception, “it has gone into over 500 editions, and been translated into every modern language, including Chinese; two operas, three films, a ballet, and at least seven plays have been based on it” (a tally long since exceeded); moreover, it was “quoted by Cavour in the Turin Parliament”, and nowadays remains familiar at all levels of Italian society.

Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873), a member of the Milanese landed gentry, began his literary career as a poet; his corpus includes two historical tragedies and philosophical, religious, social, linguistic and literary essays. Lombardy, with its capital Milan, was part of the Austrian empire, but from 1805 to 1810 the young writer lived in Paris, where a religious crisis led to his conversion to Catholicism; there too he encountered Romanticism, never prominent in Italian culture, though Manzoni became its leading representative. The historical novels of Walter Scott were sweeping through the salons of France, Germany and Russia, and Manzoni’s admiration for Scott is usually seen as crucial to the conception of I promessi sposi. It also buttressed his sympathies in the pivotal culture war that exploded in 1816 in Milan (then the heart of progressive politico-literary thinking), pitting the new Romanticism against the Enlightenment and the old classicizing world. This inflammatory journalism was suppressed by the Austrian authorities.

Inspired by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), the poet Ugo Foscolo had already written his epistolary novelUltime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last letters of Jacopo Ortis, Milan, 1802), as an expression of Italian nationalism and protest, while Silvio Pellico, in 1816 a noted figure in Milan’s great polemic, would publish his memoir of political imprisonment, Le mie prigioni (My prisons), in 1832. These exemplify the beginnings of Risorgimento literature, the writings that stimulated the growing movement for Italian independence and unification. I promessi sposi, a literary monument for all time and any place, also promoted Risorgimento thought and emotion. With its political, moral and religious commitment, the novel is almost an allegory. Manzoni’s choice of the Duchy of Milan in the early seventeenth century went beyond the emulation of Scott: the overlords then governing that territory had been Spanish, not Austrian, but their incompetence, venality and brutality prefigured aspects of nineteenth-century experience. The novel was a coded commentary for Manzoni’s own times, but, despite the censorship, he could describe the iniquities of Spanish colonial rule with relative impunity.

Life in the late 1620s was conditioned by the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War: times of famine, riots and pandemic. Manzoni’s research prompted the use of a device already employed by Cervantes and Scott: he claimed to have discovered a seventeenth-century manuscript, and “quotes” its archaic language in the novel’s text, where the author is ever-present as the interpreter of his sources. His young protagonists, Renzo and Lucia, embody an influential literary innovation. Of peasant stock, they are silk weavers from Lake Como: not of elite status, they signal the beginnings of modern realism and a new vision of society in which the lives of the poor are valued. The novel is peopled by characters, both secular and religious, in all sectors of a society harshly divided between the ruling, feudal Spanish nobility and the humble Lombard population, with – in between – those burghers and lawyers who accommodated their lives to colonial servility. All shades of morality are evidenced also in the religious figures who help or hinder the young couple in their extremity.

Manzoni created some of the most memorable characters in Italian literature. Almost unwaveringly good and sensible, Lucia (from lux, light) is mature beyond her years and secure in her faith in Providence (a recurring theme), whereas fallible Renzo’s good heart is often betrayed by his volatile emotions: this is his Bildungsroman. In a situation analogous to that of Zerlina and Masetto in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787), their marriage is impeded by the local overlord, Don Rodrigo; they flee their native territory and encounter adventures, perils and separation. Their parish priest, Don Abbondio, is known in Italy as the proverbial symbol of comic cowardice. Gertrude, the nun of Monza, based on a historical figure, personifies cruel maleficence – and yet her sins are explained psychoanalytically, avanti lettera, by her own sufferings at the hands of her aristocrat father: the seeds of a feminist argument are couched in her hellish life. Intense fear is associated with the tyrant known only as L’Innominato (the Unnamed or Nameless One): the aura of threat evaporates only after his religious conversion and the climactic release of Lucia from his castle. Despite a guilty past, the Capuchin friar, Cristoforo, is the true Christian, a self-sacrificing humanitarian. One might describe The Betrothed as a tragedy with a happy ending, but from the first page its gravity is alleviated by Manzoni’s witty irony, a sharp weapon in the implied social critique: the town of Lecco had the “benefit” of a garrison of Spanish soldiers, who “never failed to spread out into the vineyards, to thin the grapes and relieve the peasants of the trouble of harvesting them” (Michael F. Moore’s translation).

The novel had two early versions, in 1821–3 and 1825–7, before the definitive edition of 1840–2. Originally Manzoni’s style was inflected by his Lombard roots, but in 1827 he visited the literary circles of Florence (since Dante’s day the cultural capital of a notional Italy), expressly to study Florentine parlance; so began the famous process of “rinsing his rags” (the novel) in the waters of the River Arno (“nelle cui acque risciacquai i miei cenci”). Manzoni aimed to unify the Italian language, and indeed the Tuscanized text exerted a transformative influence on the development of modern literary Italian.

Moore’s fluent, accessible and sometimes lyrical translation (the first for many years) has numerous felicities. He used the Italian text edited in 2003 by the distinguished scholar Enrico Ghidetti, and Moore’s interesting introduction describes his painstaking method; yet in dialogue he occasionally strays too far into colloquial modernization: “this marriage ain’t gonna happen” smacks of Hollywood, and “buddies” won’t do for a Spanish noble’s cronies in 1630. Elsewhere, “divvy up” is too slangy for “divider le spoglie” (“to share the spoils”), while “his uncle, the Count” should replace “the Count Uncle” and “vinaigrette” is the technical term for “ampolla d’aceto”. This handsome volume, with its useful map and bibliography, its explanatory list of characters and historiography, is marred by some misprints and oddities – “States of the Church” instead of “Papal States”, “Adelchis” for “Adelchi” – and an endnote, not mindful of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, strangely declares that Manzoni “is Italy’s most celebrated writer”.

In his later years Manzoni received many honours, including a senatorship from the king of the now united nation. Verdi’s “Requiem” was composed as a profound tribute after the author’s death on May 22, 1873, and Verdi himself conducted the first performance in Milan on the first anniversary. This year Italy will be marking the 150th anniversary of Manzoni’s death in innumerable ways, both scholarly and popular. Plays about Renzo and Lucia will be performed at Lake Como’s primary schools. The writer Pierfranco Bruni will lead celebrations sponsored by parliament. Under the aegis of the Centro Nazionale di Studi Manzoniani, in a project planned by the eminent scholar Dante Isella, a trilogy of critical editions of the novel’s different versions has just been completed. Many other editions and studies will follow, while in Milan’s Duomo the public will enjoy a series of readings from the national masterpiece.