Who we are
The sauce of history. Rereading I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni
Curated by Edoardo Barbieri, Simone Carriero, Gaia Cavestri, Francesco Gesti, Daniele Gomarasca, Riccardo Piol, Ilenia Ricci, Gianluca Sgroi.
Coordinated by Alessandro Ledda.
‘That branch of Lake Como…’. Hundreds of thousands of students have read this incipit hating it (most) or loving it, in any case warned by the tales of parents and older siblings of the hard task that awaited them.
Years later, now adults, those same students have filled nostalgic conversations about the years spent between school desks with a variety of anecdotes about their experience of The Betrothed. They ranged from the moderate (‘beautiful, but perhaps too long’), to partial condemnation (‘boring’), to outright rejection (complete with unrepeatable comments).
On the other side of the desk, generations of teachers have literally inflicted on their classes a reading of the novel that is at times slavishly slavish (there is a story of a teacher who demanded the recitation from memory of the list of plants that Renzo finds in his abandoned vineyard after the night of the cheats), and at times ideological (‘novel of Catholic morality’).
There is one thing that all these different positions have in common and that is the lack of knowledge or underestimation of what really goes on between that famous opening – even though the real beginning of the novel, perhaps few remember, is ‘L’Historia si può veramente deffinire una guerra illustreiosa contro il Tempo…’ (History can truly be described as an illustrious war against Time…) – and the last page of what is instead rightly considered the most important novel in Italian literature. There are in fact very few, very few indeed, who, having passed the scholastic ‘torment’, have picked up the story of Renzo and Lucia. But that story (or perhaps we should say History) deserves to be known: the plot of The Betrothed hides a whole world made up of realism and irony, comedy and tragedy, heroism and meanness, which move one to laughter as much as to emotion.
The exhibition that the Meeting will host in its pavilions is dedicated to this world. It is not the umpteenth critical reinterpretation of the novel that will speak, but the novel itself, its text, its tale. There is nothing to ideologically demonstrate nor any position to defend a priori. There is, and that is enough, a great novel to reread.
A small number of panels are entrusted with the task of reconstructing the story of The Betrothed, highlighting the most beautiful and important passages, accompanied by brief comments and images. The review of the characters – Renzo and Lucia, Fra Cristoforo and Don Rodrigo, Cardinal Federigo and the Unnamed, but also some ‘minor’ ones – and their travails will be accompanied (or rather crossed) by some in-depth studies on the theme of Providence, which appears at times neglected and opposed, at times furtive and subdued, at times triumphant and even ostentatious in the beautiful Lombard landscape furrowed by ‘Quel ramo del lago di Como’.
