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.