SOURCE: "The Centripetal Romantic: Symphonious Discourse in Polyphonous Italy," in The Reasonable Romantic: Essays on Alessandro Manzoni, edited by Sante Matteo and Larry H. Peer, Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 33-45

In the following essay, Matteo describes the fragmented condition of the Italian language at the time that Manzoni wrote his novel I promessi sposi, calling the work "the first truly Italian discourse" and "the foundation on which modern Italian literature and language have been built.

American students of Italian literature are often perplexed when they fail to find passages from Dante's Divine Comedy or from Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) in Italian literary anthologies, compilations of selected passages from what have been judged to be the great works of Italian literature. Dante and Manzoni, they have learned, are important writers in Italian literature. Why, therefore, are their works not included in Italian anthologies? Curiously enough, the omission...