‘The material is rich,’ Manzoni wrote to the French historian Claude Fauriel. The years from 1628 to 1630 offered a dramatic backdrop: famine, military invasion and a devastating outbreak of the plague. After extensive research he had settled on a plot: the night before a young peasant couple are due to be married, the wedding is cancelled because a local Spanish lord has decided he wants the woman for himself. Manzoni chose to write about the 17th century, when the region was ruled by the Spanish. In 19th-century Lombardy, you could be jailed for criticising Austrian rule. Historical novels, they believed, encouraged national consciousness, while also offering an opportunity for veiled political statements. Both men had just read Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in French translation.

In the summer of 1822 his friend Tommaso Grossi was a guest at his house, and read aloud every evening from the epic poem he was writing, The Lombards in the First Crusade. But when, in the autumn of 1821, Manzoni told Tosi that he planned to write a novel, the priest wasn’t happy and kept a censorious eye on the pages Manzoni sent him.

A first verse tragedy, The Count of Carmagnola, was published in 1820, and a second, Adelchi, in 1822. For years he followed the long list of rules prepared by his spiritual adviser, Father Luigi Tosi, which included the injunction: ‘Your work is to be considered part of the general penitence that God has imposed on the sons of Adam.’ In 1815 he published the Sacred Hymns and in 1819 Observations on Catholic Morality. Domestic stability brought with it an outpouring of poetry, which, after his conversion in 1810 from agnosticism to a severe form of Catholicism, took a decidedly religious turn. In 1792 his mother obtained a separation from Pietro, and later went to live with a lover in Paris, where Alessandro joined her in 1805. Sent to a wet nurse in the country, the boy spent most of his childhood at Catholic boarding schools, where he immersed himself in classical literature.

She was bored by his company and it’s widely believed that Alessandro wasn’t his child. A lessandro Manzoni was born in 1785, the only child of an arranged marriage between Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the Milanese intellectual Cesare Beccaria, and Pietro Manzoni, a minor nobleman.

The betrothed michael f moore