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Alessandro Manzoni

Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (7 March 1785 – 22 May 1873) was an Italian poet and novelist. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed (orig. Italian: I Promessi Sposi) (1827), generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language.

Manzoni was born in Milan, Italy, on 7 March 1785. Pietro, his father, aged about fifty, belonged to an old family of Lecco, originally feudal lords of Barzio, in the Valsassina. The poet's maternal grandfather, Cesare Beccaria, was a well-known author, and his mother Giulia had literary talent as well. The young Alessandro spent his first two years of life in cascina Costa in Galbiate and he was wet-nursed by Caterina Panzeri, as attested by a memorial plate affixed in the place. In 1792 his parents broke their marriage and his mother began a relationship with the highbrow Carlo Imbonati, moving to England and later to Paris. For this reason, their son was brought up in several religious institutes. Alessandro Manzoni was a slow developer, and at the various colleges he attended he was considered a dunce. At fifteen, however, he developed a passion for poetry, and wrote two sonnets of considerable merit. Upon the death of his father in 1805, he joined the freethinking household of his mother at Auteuil, and spent two years mixing with the literary set of the so-called "ideologues", philosophers of the 18th-century school, among whom he made many friends, notably Claude Charles Fauriel. There too he imbibed the anti-Catholic creed of Voltairianism.