The bethrothed; "I promessi sposi" (1827)

The Betrothed follows two villagers prevented from marrying as they are caught in a larger world of power, war, hunger and plague. Manzoni's narrator moves between intimate troubles and public catastrophe with sympathy and an often comic eye for authority. Choose Michael F. Moore's translation. The novel is set in seventeenth-century Lombardy: first published in 1827, it reached its revised final form in 1842, long before the 2022 English translation.