The Betrothed

The novel is commonly described as "the most widely read work in the Italian language. It became a model for subsequent Italian literary fiction. Scholar Sergio Pacifici states that no other Italian literary work, with the exception of the Divine Comedy, "has been the object of more intense scrutiny or more intense scholarship. The novel is not only about love and power: the great questions about evil, about innocents suffering, are the underlying theme of the book. The chapters about the famine and the plague, are a powerful picture of material and moral devastation. Manzoni does not offer simple answers but leaves those questions open for the reader to meditate on.