Popular novel - How the Betrothed Made Italy

Curator: Roberto Bizzocchi

Publisher: Laterza

Year: 2022, pp. 200

Binding: Paperback

Language: Italian

Dimensions mm: 240 x 212 x 17

Out of obligation and pleasure, almost all of us have read The Betrothed. A huge diffusion that has made the characters, many episodes, many expressions typical familiar, indeed proverbial of our culture. A novel that has really made Italy, at least in its best aspects, thanks to a political and pedagogical message that it is time to rediscover.

Here, we invite you to (re)read The Betrothed in a slightly different way than usual, that is, in the company not of a man of letters, but of a scholar of Italian history. We will thus discover that The Betrothed have a strongly political character and tell us a lot about our history, not only that of the seventeenth century, about our national character, about the imprint that Catholicism has left, for better or for worse, on our moral conscience. The importance and value of the ideological message at the heart of this novel will come to light: a private morality based on freedom of choice and individual responsibility, for men and women; an enlightened sense of proportion in the evaluation of the things of the world, but with an acute awareness of the justice and injustice of social contexts and the actions of individuals.