Casa del Manzoni

Alessandro Manzoni

Poet and Novelist | From Piazza San Babila to Via Manzoni | Milan in the first half of the 19th century

Biography

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You were young, already with Giulietta, the firstborn, in tow; you needed a roof over your heads. Even the beloved country residence at Brusuglio was no longer enough. Your domestic treasure chest was the house on Via Morone. It was here that Cristina was born, after Pietro, perhaps the best-loved of your children, was already with you. Your first and only house in Milan, not inherited, not rented. Yours. The center of your world, made of meticulous habits, obsessive rituals, barriers, banks to channel your often overflowing neuroses.

In the meantime, Goethe was familiarizing Europe with your Sacred Hymns; in the meantime, with your tragedies you cast doubts on the authority of the Aristotelian unities. Those were fertile years. When the heart of the city became oppressive, you set off for Brusuglio, often on foot, in a countryside that already had overtones of Brianza, and today is in the midst of the metropolis. To “cultivate step by step,” as Carducci wrote, sewing cotton, planting black locust trees, searching for the nature of your childhood, the grape vines, the fruit trees. It was at Brusuglio that having heard news of the death of Napoleon, you wrote without a pause, “in less than three days,” your Fifth of May, with Henriette right behind you on the piano, to encourage your inspiration. At Brusuglio you finished Adelchi, and there you wrote the first pages of Fermo e Lucia. In a study that seemed like a precise replica of the one on Via Morone. Simple, monastic, packed with books and notebooks. The objective correlate of your spirit.

You were a poet, a playwright, you frequented the most noble and worthy persons of the city. It was not enough for you. You knew there was a people that was being born, a nation that had to find a language to inhabit, just as one inhabits a territory. You spoke other languages. Yours was the Milanese of everyday affairs, yours the French of intellectual speculation. But the Italy you hoped for needed a common tongue, where every word was the right word. Without mending, without synonyms that reach no conclusions. You knew the importance of words from your stuttering. “I see the word,” you said, “it is there; but it does not want to come out of my mouth.” You did not want a nation of stutterers, so you made yourself into a linguist, a philologist, you shouldered the burden of making Italian the language of all, not just the poets laureate.

What had been written had to be rewritten, “rinsing the rags in the Arno.” Finding, beyond the language, to say it with Delio Tessa, a color. Which perhaps is the green of the walls of your study, the same found in medieval libraries, reassuring, relaxing. A point of balance and reference for all those to come. You, who according to Carlo Emilio Gadda became the “writer of writers,” you knew that language, plot, truth had utility as their purpose.

There was a world to narrate, so you narrated your world. Making your domestic topography the literary map of a nation. The landscape of The Betrothed is that of your childhood, of your infancy at Caleotto. “The lay of the shoreline, the distant views; everything combines to make this a country I would call one of the most beautiful in the world,” you had written, with modesty. The nostalgia for those places, now that you had sold the property in Lecco, your northward gaze from Brusuglio on those pure days when the Lombard sky is “so beautiful when it is beautiful, so splendid, so peaceful,” is similar to Renzo’s nostalgia when, fleeing to Milan, having reached Greco, still a rural village then but now a stop on the subway line, he first raises his eyes to the silhouette of the Duomo, that urban mountain, and then looks back, towards Monte Resegone.

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