Alessandro Manzoni, ( 1785-1873), Italian poet and novelist whose novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) had immense patriotic appeal for Italians of the nationalistic Risorgimento period and is generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature.

Manzoni also produced the treatise Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (1819; “Observations on Catholic Ethics”); an ode on the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, “Marzo 1821”; and two historical tragedies influenced by Shakespeare: Il conte di Carmagnola (1820), a romantic work depicting a 15th-century conflict between Venice and Milan; and Adelchi (performed 1822), a richly poetic drama about Charlemagne’s overthrow of the Lombard kingdom and conquest of Italy. Another ode, written on the death of Napoleon in 1821, “Il cinque maggio” (1822; “The Napoleonic Ode”), was considered by Goethe, one of the first to translate it into German, as the greatest of many written to commemorate the event.

Manzoni’s masterpiece, I promessi sposi, 3 vol. (1825–27), is a novel set in early 17th-century Lombardy during the period of the Milanese insurrection, the Thirty Years’ War, and the plague.

Prompted by the patriotic urge to forge a language that would be accessible to a wide readership rather than a narrow elite, Manzoni decided to write his novel in an idiom as close as possible to contemporary educated Florentine speech. The final edition of I promessi sposi (1840–42), rendered in clear, expressive prose purged of all antiquated rhetorical forms, reached exactly the sort of broad audience he had aimed at, and its prose became the model for many subsequent Italian writers.


Revered by the men of his time, he was made a senator of Italy in 1860. A stroke followed the death of his oldest son in 1873, and he died that same year and was buried with a state funeral.