Thursday 20 June - Time 17:00

Manzoni and the game of identities (including his)

Lectio magistralis of Matteo Collura.

Identical to who?

There is an identity ethic that runs through the great novel by Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi. So defined as to have forged the national-popular consciousness, as if it were a mirror of the collective feeling and an idea of a united Italy. Having removed the dust from his monument, here appears the poet, whose human story was a succession of atrocious mourning and tragedies that today belong to history and that in his time still seemed to be born of an offended and terrible God. But it is in the game of identities, throwing on the table of time the dice of fate, that the sense of one of the most important works of the European nineteenth century must be investigated. And of an existence, that of the great Lombard author who died over 150 years ago, illuminated itself by Conversion and Providence.