![]() In its pages, however, he defined the national character. He wrote the novel in a period when Italy had not yet become a nation. If Dante is the country’s supreme poet, Manzoni is its supreme novelist. Rather than the protagonists of history, they were its victims.Įveryone in Italy reads I promessi sposi when they are in school, sometimes two or three times. And at the center of his novel, he had placed not a pair of upper-class lovers, as was the case in many of his European contemporaries' works, but two peasants. He had rejected the idea of forging a hybrid national language, combining elements from all the regional dialects, in favor of a standard based on the literature and modern speech of a single region, Tuscany. He was a pioneer in combining fiction and documents. Manzoni had created the modern language as well as the country’s greatest novel, I promessi sposi ( The Betrothed). Regardless of the topic, however, many of the discussions came to center on a writer who had died one hundred and fifty years earlier: Alessandro Manzoni. Each panel was supposed to address a broad theme: destinies, combat with reality, and the definition of “Italianness” were a few. ![]() ![]() In June of last year, a group of about twenty prominent Italian writers gathered in New York for a series of panel discussions over the course of three days. ![]()
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