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 Manzoni used historical documents to give a precise account of how the emergency of the bubonic plague was (mis)handled.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.