Alessandro Manzoni

Alessandro Manzoni was a Milanese nobleman, the grandson of Beccaria, who converted to Catholicism in Paris in 1810 and spent twenty years on The Betrothed, the story of two peasants in seventeenth-century Lombardy kept from marrying by a local tyrant, through famine, riot and the plague of Milan. Published in 1827 and rewritten in the Tuscan of Florence in 1840, it is the Italian novel, the one every Italian reads at school, and its language helped make a national one. Verdi wrote his Requiem for him. He was a senator of the kingdom he had helped to imagine.