Waverley Novels influenced I promessi sposi (The Betrothed)

Manzoni read Scott closely, met him in 1827, and built I promessi sposi on the Waverley model: a historical crisis seen from below, through two people with no power in it. The debt is in the frame as much as the plot. Manzoni opens with a discovered seventeenth-century manuscript which he claims to be modernising, which is Scott's antiquarian apparatus used straight, and the novel's set pieces, the bread riot, the plague and the lazaretto, are researched from documents in the way Scott had made standard. Scott is reported to have said, after the meeting, that it was the finest book he had ever read, which is the exchange usually cited when the two are discussed together.