Le due mogli di Manzoni

Teresa never expected to fall in love with Alessandro Manzoni even before meeting him in person. Yet, she is not the type to lose her head easily: she is a wealthy young widow with a son, a social position and a culture that allows her to shine in the salons of 19th-century Milan. So when he too is widowed by his first wife Enrichetta, crushed by yet another pregnancy, a devoted friend arranges a felonious encounter during a premiere at La Scala. The wedding is celebrated in January 1837 and the marriage is immediately full of passion, but Teresa finds herself stepmother to seven difficult first-born children, daughter-in-law to an impossible mother-in-law and wife to a man quite different from what she expected: full of neuroses, problematic and incapable of love. One year after another, one disappointment after another, while all around her the adventurous destinies of the Italy to be unified are being fulfilled, even the strong feeling that binds her to Alessandro is in danger of faltering. Teresa’s voice telling her story is the voice of every woman who loves too much, and these pages, impeccable in their historical reconstruction, transport her story into the universal dimension of love that exalts but can also destroy. Manzoni, revealed in a new and intimate light, comes down from his pedestal and appears to us human, with his tendernesses and miseries. So that in this novel the protagonists’ time and our own, life and literature, meet and recognise each other, as in a vertigo.