I promessi sposi (The Betrothed)

Manzoni read Scott and set out to do it for Italy. He said so, he met Scott in Milan in 1827, and the anecdote Scott is supposed to have offered afterwards, that I Promessi Sposi was the finest novel ever written, has followed both books since. What Waverley supplied was the form: ordinary invented people whose lives are rearranged by a documented historical crisis, real figures kept at the edges, the period researched rather than assumed, and dialect written down. Manzoni's change is the one that mattered for Italy. He wrote it three times to settle on a Tuscan the whole peninsula could read, so the book is both the first Italian historical novel and an argument about what the Italian language should be.

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.