Manzoni gotico. Tre itinerari illegali ne I Promessi sposi

A persecuted maiden, a dissipated woman, a bandit holed up in his castle; and then there are nightmarish crimes, a convent full of secrets, a plague… a pestilence… In the heyday of the Gothic novel, Manzoni takes some of the genre’s most stereotypical situations and distorts them until they are unrecognisable. Fabio Camilletti reads The Betrothed to discover a novel that was never written and to understand the Gothic no longer as a genre but as a ‘mode’ capable of influencing many different cultural products. A book aimed not only at the community of literary scholars, but also at the general public, with its references to the strange, to the Gothic and, of course, to Manzoni’s characters, who have recently enjoyed a comeback in the limelight, even on social media, 150 years after Alessandro Manzoni’s death.