Two TV series have been made and a third one is reportedly in the works. In the twentieth century, several film adaptations were made, starting in the silent era. Many of the expressions he coined have entered into everyday speech. The novel was extremely popular when it came out, both in the earlier 1827 edition, and in the revised 1840 edition. He also defined the national language at a time when the vast majority of Italians were illiterate, and the written language, based on the great triumvirate of the fourteenth century-Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio-was antiquated. 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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