On Monday 7 February 2022, we read an extract from Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed]; we used an annotated edition by Roberto Fedi and Vasco Gaiffi (Milano: Mursia, 1993) and read pp. 636-642, that is the beginning of chapter 23. This reading was accompanied by “The Mask of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe and represented the “historical” part in a session entitled “Gothic and historical plague narratives in the nineteenth century.”

Manzoni’s novel is the most widely read in Italian schools; all students in the peninsula will have been exposed to it. Together with Dante’s Divine Comedy, it is still a source for a number of quotes and examples of antonomasia (the use of a proper name to express a general idea) in the Italian language. As it is the case for Dante, the reason for Manzoni’s importance in the school canon is language: after a first version published in 1827, the Milanese Manzoni thoroughly revised the text, to the point of rewriting the novel entirely, after purposely spending some time in Florence to learn the Tuscan language as it was spoken there and, as he put it, “sciacquare i panni in Arno” [rinsing his wash in the river Arno]. It was not his personal fancy: it was a complicated matter widely discussed in the process of the national unification. The text as we read it today dates from 1840-42.

The Betrothed is a historical novel and the first modern novel in the Italian literary tradition. Inspired by Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (which Manzoni read in a French translation), it tells the story of Renzo and Lucia, two young lovers who are prevented from marrying because Don Rodrigo, the local tyrant, desires Lucia. The novel is set in Lombardy in the late 1620s, during the Spanish rule, and one of its most notable parts is the description of the plague that devastated Milan in 1630. Manzoni used historical documents to give a precise account of how the emergency of the bubonic plague was (mis)handled. The description of the plague’s outbreak is one of the most memorable things in Manzoni’s accurate historical description, but since we will explore this aspect through Camus’ La peste [The Plague], here we concentrated on the fictional account of how Don Rodrigo, the baddy, finally dies. Manzoni masterly describes the gradual realisation of his condition:

“He felt himself growing hotter and more restless. He brought his thoughts back to the season, the wine he had drunk, his debauched existence, and he would have only been too glad to blame them for everything. But these ideas were spontaneously replaced by a thought which in those days was associated with all of them, which invaded his mind from every direction, which had cropped up in every speech made at the wild party he had just left, because it was easier to joke about it than to ignore it – the thought of the plague.”

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

While he takes his time to describe Don Rodrigo’s infection and death at length, indulging in the account of all symptoms and thoughts and dreams of this character , Manzoni accelerates dramatically when it is the turn of Griso, Don Rodrigo’s servant:

“Griso stayed behind to make a further rapid choice of whatever might be useful to him; then he packed everything up in a single bundle and went off. He had been very careful not to touch the monatti, nor to let them touch him. But in that last rapid search, he had picked up the clothes which Don Rodrigo had left by the bed, and had given them a shake, without any other thought except that of seeing if there was any money in them. The following day, however, he did have occasion to give the matter some further thought; for as he sat guzzling in a tavern, he was suddenly overtaken by a trembling fit, his eyes were dazzled by the light, the strength left his limbs, and he fell to the floor. His companions deserted him, and he fell into the hands of the monatti, who stripped him of what clothes he had on that were worth having and threw him on to their cart. He died on the way to the lazaretto where they had taken his master.”

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Don Rodrigo and Griso—deaths from plagues at different speeds.

On Monday 31 January 2022, in a session entitled “Florence, 1348: The Black Death,” we read from Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on the Introduction to the First Day . We read the Italian text from Vittore Branca’s 1992 edition and the English text from the 1903 translation by M.J. Rigg.

Both can be found here as part of the Decameron Web project at Brown University. This reading was the first in a series on literary plagues (the others being Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death,” Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi [The Betrothed], Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Albert Camus’ La peste).

Famously, at the beginning of Day 1, Boccaccio describes the plague of 1348 in Florence, which spread like a fire (“just as fire devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it”). He describes not only the physical effects of the plagues, starting with its typical gavoccioli (swellings), but also its moral effects on the population:

“how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

From the 1348 plague originates the frame narrative in which all the stories of the Decameron are contained: because, “on a Tuesday morning […] [in] the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella” in Florence, seven young ladies decide to seek refuge in the countryside—and there, they tell all the stories of the Decameron. Not just the seven young ladies, though: before leaving Florence, they make sure that three young men join them, because:

“We are sensitive, perverse, suspicious, pusillanimous and timid; wherefore I much misdoubt, that, if we find no other guidance than our own, this company is like to break up sooner, and with less credit to us, than it should. Against which it were well to provide at the outset.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

Their description of the gentle sex would not please women and feminist of today. But can’t we also see a remarkable sense of agency in this “provision” that these women make for their retreat in the countryside?

One last point: many, of course, have recalled Boccaccio’s description of the plague during the Covid-19 pandemic. However, one of the most interesting ways to reconnect with the Decameron was to re-enact it. Among the most notable outcomes of this idea are the New York Times’ Decameron Project (2020), in English, and the Nuovo Decameron (Harper Collins Italia, 2021), in Italian.

On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Dante, Inferno, X, 22-81, 94-114, using Petrocchi’s edition for the Italian text and Allen Mandelbaum’s English translation. Both can be accessed through the Digital Dante project at Columbia University. The session focused on “The new year and the future” and together with Dante we read Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by] and Virginia Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915.

Dante’s canto X is about the souls of the Epicureans punished in the Inferno, who know the distant future but cannot see the present:

“We see, even as men who are farsighted,
those things,” he said, “that are remote from us;
the Highest Lord allots us that much light.

But when events draw near or are, our minds
are useless; were we not informed by others,
we should know nothing of your human state.

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

This is Farinata degli Uberti speaking, the Ghibelline who, upon hearing Dante’s Tuscan accent, asks him imperiously who his ancestors were. This is how the dialogue between these two Tuscans from opposite parties (Ghibelline and Guelph) starts, but it is soon interrupted by Cavalcanti de’ Cavalcanti, who asks Dante why his son, Guido (Cavalcanti), is not with him:

He looked around me, just as if he longed
to see if I had come with someone else;
but then, his expectation spent, he said

in tears: “If it is your high intellect
that lets you journey here, through this blind prison,
where is my son? Why is he not with you?”

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Dante hesitates for a moment, enough for Cavalcante to think that his son Guido is dead. Devastated by this thought, Cavalcante collapses, and we don’t see him again.

Farinata’s assurance and Cavalcante’s desperate paternal love make this canto memorable, but the intensity of Dante’s dialogue with them is heightened by their peculiar condition: they see the distant future but ignore the present — unlike Dante, unlike us.

On Monday 17 January 2022 we read Giacomo Leopardi’s “Dialogo di un venditore d’almanacchi e di un passeggere” [Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by], written in 1832, taking both the Italian text and the English translation from the bilingual book: Giacomo Leopardi, Operette Morali / Essays and Dialogues, translated, with introduction and notes by Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 478-483. We read Leopardi’s dialogue during a session that focused on “The new year and the future”, which included also Virginia Woolf’s diary entries of 1 and 18 January 1915 and Dante’s Canto X, 22-81, 94-114.

This dialogue by Leopardi is an illustration of his philosophy: life is painful, and people can only be happy when they imagine that they will be: therefore, in the future, never in the present. The passer-by asks the peddler whether he would like to live over again; he would, but only if he did not know what awaits him.

“PEDDLER: Any kind [of life], just as God would send it to me, with no other conditions.

PASSER-BY: Any life at random, without knowing anything about it in advance, just as we don’t know anything about the new year?

PEDDLER: Precisely.

PASSER-BY: That’s what I would like too if I were to live all over again; and that’s what everyone would like”.

[Listen to this extract in Italian]

Happiness is only possible in the future, which means that it is, in fact, impossible; the only way we experience it is by imagining it:

“The life that’s beautiful is not the life we know, but the life we don’t know; not the past life, but the future.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian]

In the UK there is a Leopardi Centre at the University of Birmingham, to which we owe the first full English translation of Leopardi’s notebook. In it, you will also find the exposition of the philosophy that the Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-by proposes in a narrative form.

Of this very dialogue, there is a beautiful 10-min film adaptation made by the Italian director Ermanno Olmi in 1954 in a neo-realist style: you can see it HERE

Buona visione!

On 10 December 2021 we read pages from Paola Masino’s Nascita e morte della massaia (Milan: ISBN, 2009), in particular from chapter 2 (pp. 14-20), chapter 5 (pp. 98-101), and chapter 6 (pp. 120-123). We used Marella Feltrin-Morris’ translation (Paola Masino, Birth and Death of the Housewife, New York: SUNY Press, 2010; pp. 24-28, 87-90, 107-109).

Masino’s novel, written between 1938 and 1939, was first published as a volume in 1945. It is a fierce attack against marriage and motherhood, and against the confined role of the housewife, or angel of the home, assigned to women for centuries and re-inculcated in them by the early-twentieth-century bourgeois society and the Fascist regime. You could say that it is an early feminist work, yet Masino defies specific labels, and in the 1945 author’s note at the end of the volume, she refers to her book as “this portrait of a woman, which already seems so distant from me that I can barely recognize it.”

What readers never fail to feel is the energy, and irony, and sarcasm, in Masino’s writing, from the very beginning, when the Housewife, from her cradle-trunk full of breadcrumbs and books, questions her mother and investigates the world, making everyone uncomfortable, until the very end, when society, with its values and institutions, has made the Housewife uncomfortable – the Housewife who never rests in peace, not even in her grave.

The novel combines various literary genres and forms, including drama, personal diary, and the fantastic. Among the many passages here is one that is both surreal and vitriolic; but we’ll cut it to the surreal vision, not to make the quote too long:

“the war suggested a dream to me […] I was on the porch, watching paratroopers jump from invisible airplanes. The sky, filled with tiny raining men and white umbrellas, looked like the sea in summertime, when jellyfish migrate. As they came down and sailed around me, the paratroopers remained stuck in taut clothes lines. Kicking their feet in the air, they all yelled at me, while I ran from one to the other showing them the laundry and protesting: “Don’t you recognize your shirt? Here are your handkerchiefs. Who watches over your sleep if not I? Who always makes sure you find fresh laundered sheets on your bed? What are you complaining about? Who are you yelling at? […] You fly, and we remain on the ground. […] And in fact, after dangling for a while on the clotheslines, now with a soft bounce the aviators rose and spread again all over the sky. They looked like round yawns let our by the air.”

[Listen to this extract in Italian:]

If it were a painting, Masino’s book would be Max Ernst’s The Angel of the Home or the Triumph of Surrealism, painted in 1937.

On 29 November 2021 we read pages from Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Torino: Einaudi, 1979), in particular the very beginning (pp. 3-4) and from chapter 7 (pp. 153, 155-156). We used William Weaver’s translation (Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1981; pp. 3-4, 153, 155-56 [this is not a mistake: yes, the page numbers are incredibly the same as in the Italian edition].

Calvino’s book was first published in 1979. It is a novel in a post-structuralist, post-modernist vein, one that plays very much on form and exposes, so to speak, the process of writing (or rather, in this case, of reading) and the artificial nature of literature. Yet it is also a book about the pleasure(s) of reading, and those amongst us who have read it in its entirety agreed that, once they began reading it, they could not stop.

There is a remarkable scene when the male Reader and the female Reader (two “functions” and two “characters” at the same time) mate – it is perhaps one of the least sexually arousing sexual encounters in literature. Here, reading and mating are the same:

“And you too, O [male] Reader, are meanwhile an object of reading: the Other [female] Reader now is reviewing your body as if skimming the index.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

But they are also different:

“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies […] differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous, divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost.”

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

This is also a book about the beginning, or beginnings. When does a story begin? But, once again, what are we talking about? A love story, or a literary story? Or our love for literature?

“To begin. You’re [the] one who said it, […] [female Reader]. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot,” writes Calvino.

[Listen to this quote in Italian:]

Have you read this book?