Manzoni returns to cause discussion just when he seemed to have been handed over, once and for all, to scholastic tradition. The new controversy over the Betrothed – are you still reading them after two years? send them back to the fourth year? defend them as a founding text or free them from obligation? — has rekindled the spotlight on the author that generations of students met between Renzo, Lucia, Don Abbondio and the plague. Manzoni is also the writer who showed how history can become a novel without ceasing to be history: documents, language, archives, invention, moral judgement, irony, chronicles of power and its abuses, everything is context and content in the Betrothed. To understand if that lesson is still alive, we have chosen to move the question from the school desk to the desk of those who, today, continue to write historical novels. Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti, who have been teaming up with their daughter Theodora Maria Sorti for a few years, have just returned to the bookshop with Unicum Opuspublished by Rizzoli BUR: a “two-faced” novel, with two covers and two parallel and independent stories but intimately intertwined with each other. Unicum takes the reader to the baroque Rome of 1670, among conclaves, cardinal factions, mysterious attacks starring Atto Melani, a former castrated singer and secret agent of Louis XIV. In Opus instead Anatole France, the great French writer, is obsessively searching for a manuscript that takes him on the trail of Atto Melani on a journey on the wings of memory.
Their narrative has made the document, the setting and the archival investigation a fruitful material: we interviewed them to understand how the workshop of a historical novelist works today and whether the classics are really too difficult for children.
1. In your novels, historical research is a supporting structure. How does your working method work?
Rita – It is primarily an investigative method. Already in the seventeenth century, Gabriel Naudé taught that the past is written by the puppeteers of history and their bards, supported to prevent its rewriting. We focus our attention precisely on these vestals of lies, always so current: a document that doesn’t add up, an official version too smooth not to have been smoothed. The novel is born when that detail begins to illuminate a system of power.
2. There is also an almost investigative charm in archival research: finding a trace, connecting clues, discovering details left on the margins. You have discovered the secret archive of Atto Melani, searched in vain by historians. But that’s not the only discovery you made while working on Unicum Opus, right?
Theodora Maria – The list would be as long as Leporello’s! In particular, we were moved by a story which seems to have inspired Manzoni for his novel: the true story, between Como and Milan, of two betrothed spouses separated by a kidnapping, ordered by a very powerful character who dictates the law behind the scenes, has its classic “good” ones and is part of the famous seventeenth-century “cries”.
Francesco – The readers of Imprimaturour first novel, they know him well: he is the cardinal who, shortly thereafter, will become Pope Innocent XI, born Benedetto Odescalchi. His very rich family was related to that of Carlo Imbonati, the man venerated by Manzoni and romantically linked to his mother, Giulia Beccaria. A cousin of Pope Odescalchi married a seventeenth-century Carlo Imbonati; together they lived at Villa Imbonati, where Manzoni stayed as a young man. The Manzonis and the Odescalchis even intersect in the famous Colonna Infame, commissioned by the Milanese jurist GB Trotti, a family related both to that of Innocent XI and the writer (his daughter Sofia married a Trotti). But biographical links aside, there is a dramatic story. The “betrothed” were called Giovanna Odescalchi, niece of the cardinal, and Francesco Gallio: two engaged couples just eighteen years old, with a written marriage promise. Aiming for a more advantageous bond with the Borromeo family (the Gallios were on the decline), the cardinal uncle – after the death of the girl’s father – opposes the union, and causes the Spanish governor to intervene. The girl was deprived of her freedom, her boyfriend arrested and locked up. Giovanna was finally forced to marry Carlo Borromeo, nephew of the famous Cardinal Federico, Manzoni’s hero. It is difficult not to suspect in all this a source of inspiration for the story of Renzo and Lucia. With a tragic difference in the ending: Giovanna Odescalchi dies in childbirth shortly after the wedding, leaving her little son an orphan and the man she hadn’t chosen a widower.
RITA – “Given all these coincidences, we are particularly happy that Rizzoli has decided to nominate Unicum Opus for the Manzoni Città di Lecco prize for the historical novel”.
3. Writing novels like yours means dedicating months, years of study before and during writing. What drives you to choose such a demanding path, in an editorial time often dominated by speed?
Rita – At great existential crossroads we have never managed to choose the most convenient path, if it didn’t also seem like the right one.
Francesco – From here was born the war that a quarter of a century ago led us to the break with Mondadori following the publication of Imprimatur and to be published for 13 years only abroad. And peace with the Segrate group also arose from here: now the Atto Melani series is in Rizzoli, which is republishing it in editions updated with our latest discoveries. We met managers there who appreciated our difficult choices at the time.
4. We live in a time where fantasy seems to tap into a huge part of readers’ desire for escape. Why, in your opinion, is it worth returning to historical fiction?
Theodora Maria – History offers the best plots, and calls to be freed from distorting mirrors: omissions, lies, destroyed documents. This is precisely what makes it powerful compared to fantasy. It’s a shame that many historical novels today are fantasies in disguise, for ideological, commercial purposes or out of laziness. It is worth returning to the historical novel only if it is a Bildungsroman, and not a mere jumble of more or less accurate facts, aligned with the current situation.
5. Are modern novels the key to accessing the classics, or do we have to resign ourselves to the fact that “the classics are now too difficult”?
Theodora Maria – Times have changed. Why not use cinema and TV, which have a noble and almost centuries-old history, to support the study of the classics? The paradox is extreme: at school only books, and at home your eyes glued to YouTube. We need to reconcile the two worlds. Example: making the children watch the Betrothed, in parallel with school reading, in the 1967 RAI drama by Sandro Bolchi, with Nino Castelnuovo and Paola Pitagora in the role of the bride and groom, flanked by immense names such as Tino Carraro in the role of Don Abbondio, Lea Massari in that of the nun of Monza, Franco Parenti was Azzeccagarbugli, Luigi Vannucchi as Don Rodrigo, Salvo Randone the Unnamed, Massimo Girotti played Fra’ Cristoforo, and many other great names of art theatre. Above all, Riccardo Bacchelli’s screenplay made it a captivating text but also extremely faithful to Manzoni. Ideal for the two-year period. My brother and I spent hours watching Rai dramas from the 50s and 60s as children, happily sprawled on the floor: we have to thank them if we then enjoyed reading the books from which they were based. And despite this, we grew up abroad: we graduated and graduated in German and English.
