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31 - Manzoni and the novel

from The Age of Romanticism (1800–1870)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

Edited by
Peter Brand  and
Lino Pertile
Peter Brand
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Lino Pertile
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

Early life and works

Cesare Beccaria, famous in the 1760s throughout the civilised world for advocating the abolition of torture and capital punishment, wished to stop the affair between his lively and beautiful daughter, Giulia, and Giovanni Verri, the playboy brother of his friends Pietro and Alessandro (renowned editors of Il Caffè, one of the most influential journals of the Italian Enlightenment; see above, pp. 378–80). Pietro arranged Giulia's marriage to the obscure Count Pietro Manzoni, twenty-six years her senior, as if that could stop the affair. In 1785 she gave birth to Alessandro, whom her husband acknowledged although he was (presumably) Giovanni Verri's son. After seven years in a steadily worsening relationship, Giulia went to live with Carlo Imbonati, a wealthy merchant banker, and Alessandro was farmed out to various religious boarding schools which gave him very unpleasant memories but a good classical education. By reaction he became a confirmed anti-clerical and challenger of established authority, ready to join the Romantic movement, and make friends with some of its acknowledged leaders, like Ermes Visconti and Federigo Confalonieri. His nationalism and love of history were stimulated by his contacts with the Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco, while his enthusiasm for poetry was kindled by sympathetic advice from Monti and Foscolo.

Imbonati, who had never met Alessandro, invited him to Paris early in 1805, but died suddenly before his arrival, making Giulia his heiress and laying the foundations of her son's future financial well-being (a fact that later on must have seriously troubled his conscience). Through his mother's circle of friends Alessandro came into contact with a group of intellectuals known as les idéologues, from the views of one of them, the philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who believed that the philosopher's task was chiefly to analyse the origins and mechanism of mental processes: philosophy was to become 'ideology' in the special sense of 'enquiry into the development of ideas'.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Italian Literature , pp. 427 - 439
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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References

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  • Manzoni and the novel
  • Edited by Peter Brand, University of Edinburgh, Lino Pertile, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Italian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521434928.032
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  • Manzoni and the novel
  • Edited by Peter Brand, University of Edinburgh, Lino Pertile, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Italian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521434928.032
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Manzoni and the novel
  • Edited by Peter Brand, University of Edinburgh, Lino Pertile, Harvard University, Massachusetts
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Italian Literature
  • Online publication: 28 March 2008
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521434928.032
Available formats
×