Henry James decried 19th-century historical novels as “loose baggy monsters,” but a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” demonstrates the genre’s power.
In Renzo and Lucia’s village, worse trouble is brewing. Peasants in the fields “were sowing seed parsimoniously, sparely, begrudgingly, as if they were risking something they cared about deeply. . . . A scrawny girl, leading an emaciated cow by a rope while it grazed, took a look around and then stooped down quickly to steal some herbs to feed her family, having learned from hunger that men, too, can subsist on grass.” Famine is coming to Lombardy.
Back to Renzo. He, brave boy, goes to Milan, where he finds himself in the middle of food riots, because of the famine. He helps save an official from being lynched by a hungry mob, but, in the process, attracts the attention of a police agent, who proceeds to march him to prison. En route, he escapes and takes off, on foot, to Bergamo, out of Milanese jurisdiction and hence beyond the powers seeking his imprisonment. Also, he has a cousin in Bergamo, who will give him a job.
He eventually arrives at the lazaretto, or quarantine area, filled with the dying and those ministering to them, including many Capuchin friars. The lazaretto has a fenced-off area for women and, within it, a place where the babies of dead mothers are cared for, with wet nurses, and also nanny goats, giving suck to the children. It is in the domestic setting of the women’s quarters, appropriately, that Renzo at last finds Lucia. “Oh, Renzo!” she cries.
Manzoni was a philologist of sorts—he wrote essays on language—and he deplored the ragbag nature of his native tongue. Because, in his time, Italians mostly stayed close to home and were ruled by foreigners, they barely had a native tongue; the peninsula was a patchwork of mutually unintelligible dialects.
Everything had been pulled up by the roots or roughly chopped down: grape vines, mulberries, and fruit trees of every kind. You could still see the vestiges of the old plantings through new growth in crooked lines where there used to be straight rows. Here and there fresh twigs or shoots sprouted from mulberry, fig, peach, cherry, and plum trees. But even they were crowded out by a dense variety of new growth that had germinated and flourished, untended by human hands.
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