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ANYONE WHO HAS LIVED in Italy for protracted stays will encounter the aura of Alessandro Manzoni. Though he wrote only a single novel, The Betrothed: A Tale of XVII Century Milan, and a few memorable poems, he is for literate Italians a cultural titan akin to Dante, Verdi, Leopardi, Ungaretti.
When Alessandro Manzoni died at the age of eighty-eight on May 22, 1873, Italy observed a day of mourning. In the United States, it is inconceivable that there should have been a day of mourning for Walt Whitman or Herman Melville, to this moment our most enduring writers. Manzoni is hardly of Dante's eminence, but, then, who is, except for Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Montaigne? Yet in Italy, where alas so few now read Dante, Manzoni still finds an audience.