The Betrothed     by Alessandro Manzoni, Translated by B Penman Original title: I promessi sposi Original language: Italian Published by Viking Penguin Pub. Date: 1984 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 1.17 x 7.77 x 5.09 ISBN: 014044274X List Price: $14.95, £10.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.79 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.20 Published by Penguin Pub. Date: 1983 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £7.99 Not available for ordering

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The Betrothed is the ‘bible’ of Italian literature. Set in seventeenth century Lombardy when Italy was under Spanish rule, it tells the symbolic story of Renzo and Lucia, whose intended wedding is obstructed by the whim of a bullying minor lord, Don Rodrigo. Separated by his peremptory act, they are reunited only after serial misfortunes involving a huge array of characters as many individual stories. The eventual wedding is the triumph of the ‘humble’ over injustice.


The book was published in its definitive form, after a long gestation period, in 1840 — a critical time when the idea of national unity was making progress in a Lombardy occupied by the Austrians. Among its many merits is its large contribution to the formation of a sense of national identity, which gave the population a spark of hope for a future free from foreign subjugation. It achieved this not only by being a piece of moral education but also by its language. The Italian of The Betrothed, an Italian cleansed of regionalisms which rediscovers many of its origins in the dialect of Tuscany, has become a compulsory linguistic point of reference, an event in the history of literature on a par with Dante’s Divine Comedy.

‘She was the youngest daughter of Prince ***, a great nobleman of Milan, who could reckon himself among the richest men in the city. But so high an opinion did he hold of his rank, that his wealth seemed only just sufficient, in fact scarcely adequate, to maintain its prestige; and his great preoccupation was to keep what there was all together in perpetuity, so far as lay in his power. History does not tell us how many children he had; all it does is give us to understand that he had destined all the younger children of either sex to the cloister, so as to leave the family fortune intact for the eldest son, whose function it was to perpetuate the family... The unhappy creature of our story was still hidden in her mother’s womb when her state in life had already been irrevocably settled. ...On her seeing the light of day, her father the prince, wishing to give her a name which would at once suggest to her the idea of the cloister...called her Gertrude. Dolls dressed as nuns were the first toys to be put into her hands, then holy pictures representing nuns, such presents always being given with warm recommendations to treasure them as something precious, and with a «Lovely, eh?» in a tone of affirmation and interrogation.’ p120