Precisely because four years have passed.
Reviewing a book at the time of its publication inevitably means reviewing, to some extent, the noise that surrounds it: publishers’ publicity, book presentations, interviews, newspaper reviews, the enthusiasm of friends and colleagues, and more or less spontaneous controversies. Returning to it a few years later allows us to ask a perhaps more interesting question: what has it left behind?
It is a question we have already asked, in these same pages, about another book by a historian of the early modern period, Antonino De Francesco’s La palla al piede. Una storia del pregiudizio antimeridionale , published by Feltrinelli in 2012. Not because four, five, ten, or thirteen years are enough to pronounce definitive judgements on a book’s fortunes, but because they at least allow us to distinguish immediate success from the ability to leave a lasting mark.
Some books produce their effects slowly, while others “explode” upon publication. The latter tend to have effective titles, readily identifiable theses, a powerful publishing machine behind them, and the ability to capture contemporary sensibilities. For a few months they seem to be books that everyone simply has to discuss. Then time does its work and makes it possible to assess whether, behind the brilliant packaging, there was also something capable of permanently reshaping a field of study.
In Bizzocchi’s case, the question can be asked without malice: was Romanzo popolare an important book on Manzoni, or was it above all an ordinary product of the Manzoni moment of 2022-2023, widely discussed and promoted upon publication and then progressively reabsorbed, together with its interpretative provocation, once that particular season had passed?
In Bizzocchi’s case, the question can be asked without malice: was Romanzo popolare an important book on Manzoni, or was it above all an ordinary product of the Manzoni moment of 2022-2023, widely discussed and promoted upon publication and then progressively reabsorbed, together with its interpretative provocation, once that particular season had passed?
It would be incorrect to claim that the book has disappeared. Indeed, Laterza reissued it in paperback in 2024. Nor did it lack distinguished interlocutors when it first appeared. The book was discussed by historians, Italianists, and Manzoni scholars and was the subject of numerous public presentations. What appears less evident when looking back from 2026 is the extent of its impact and originality: did it really establish a new interpretative line within Manzoni studies, or did it simply relaunch, in an effective and deliberately contemporary guise, themes and readings that were already at least partly present in the critical tradition?
It is perhaps precisely this gap between the ambition of the proposal and its subsequent sedimentation that makes the book more interesting to reread today than it was to review in the heat of the moment.
It is perhaps precisely this gap between the ambition of the proposal and its subsequent sedimentation that makes the book more interesting to reread today than it was to review in the heat of the moment.
A surprisingly contemporary Manzoni
There is something irresistible about Bizzocchi’s operation. A long-established historian of the early modern period, he ventures into what is perhaps the most heavily mined territory of Italian literature with a precise mission: to rescue Alessandro Manzoni from what generations of teachers, school textbooks, and official commemorations are supposed to have made of him.
The grey, Catholic, moderate, paternalistic, and somewhat tedious Manzoni must give way to the real Manzoni: Enlightened, radical, on the side of the oppressed, hostile to abuses of power, sensitive to individual rights, surprisingly attentive to female autonomy and, naturally, a moral architect of modern Italy.
This is essentially the programme announced in the publisher’s presentation as well: a morality founded on freedom of choice and individual responsibility “for men and women”, together with a denunciation of social injustice and abuses by the powerful.
The operation is carried out with considerable dexterity, a fair degree of learning, and an agreeable style. The problem, if anything, is that the restoration seems to have worked almost too well.
Once the work is complete, Count Alessandro Manzoni, born in Milan in 1785, bears a surprising resemblance to a cultivated European progressive intellectual of our own day.
Bizzocchi himself seems to have enjoyed progressively raising the stakes. In his conversation with Alessandro Barbero organised by CasaLaterza, the discussion reaches almost paradoxical conclusions. “You see, Sandro, Manzoni isn’t a moderate at all. He’s like Brecht,” Bizzocchi observes. Barbero raises the stakes: “He’s a communist.” And Bizzocchi adds that at one point in the book he even compares him to Engels.
They are joking, of course. But the jokes work precisely because they take to its extreme a tendency that is genuinely present in the book: making Manzoni interesting by demonstrating how much, deep down, he resembled us.
The grey, Catholic, moderate, paternalistic, and somewhat tedious Manzoni must give way to the real Manzoni: Enlightened, radical, on the side of the oppressed, hostile to abuses of power, sensitive to individual rights, surprisingly attentive to female autonomy and, naturally, a moral architect of modern Italy.
This is essentially the programme announced in the publisher’s presentation as well: a morality founded on freedom of choice and individual responsibility “for men and women”, together with a denunciation of social injustice and abuses by the powerful.
The operation is carried out with considerable dexterity, a fair degree of learning, and an agreeable style. The problem, if anything, is that the restoration seems to have worked almost too well.
Once the work is complete, Count Alessandro Manzoni, born in Milan in 1785, bears a surprising resemblance to a cultivated European progressive intellectual of our own day.
Bizzocchi himself seems to have enjoyed progressively raising the stakes. In his conversation with Alessandro Barbero organised by CasaLaterza, the discussion reaches almost paradoxical conclusions. “You see, Sandro, Manzoni isn’t a moderate at all. He’s like Brecht,” Bizzocchi observes. Barbero raises the stakes: “He’s a communist.” And Bizzocchi adds that at one point in the book he even compares him to Engels.
They are joking, of course. But the jokes work precisely because they take to its extreme a tendency that is genuinely present in the book: making Manzoni interesting by demonstrating how much, deep down, he resembled us.
Naturally, the existence within Manzoni’s intellectual biography of a radical, Jacobin-leaning, and strongly anticlerical youthful phase is hardly a recent discovery. The young author of the Trionfo della libertà, raised in the intellectual climate of the Lombard Enlightenment and close during his Paris years to circles that were anything but clerical, has long been the subject of Manzonian biography and criticism. Equally well known are the complexity of his subsequent conversion and the persistence, in the Catholic Manzoni, of themes and sensibilities deriving from his Enlightenment formation. The question, therefore, is not to discover that Manzoni was a radical in his youth, but to establish how legitimate it is to turn that intellectual genealogy into a key capable of defining Manzoni’s mature thought as a whole and, above all, the political and civic message of the Promessi sposi.
From this perspective, part of the proclaimed “novelty” of Romanzo popolare might perhaps deserve to be scaled down. The issue is not to demonstrate that behind the Catholic Manzoni lay an Enlightenment and radical past: we already knew that. The issue is to demonstrate that this past entitles us to read the mature Manzoni as a radical who remained essentially such, albeit in new forms. It is here that Bizzocchi’s distinctive thesis properly begins — and it is here, therefore, that it should be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny.
The chorus of enthusiasm
The book’s initial reception was fairly favourable. After all, the volume possessed many attractive features: a distinguished historian, a major publisher, a great national classic, and a thesis sufficiently counter-intuitive to be immediately communicable.
Writing in Il Sole 24 Ore, Paola Bianchi welcomed it in an article with the eloquent title Oltre il melodramma. Manzoni e il romanzo popolare per fare la nazione. The enthusiasm is understandable: a historian of the early modern period demonstrating how fruitful it can be to read Manzoni as a historian finds another historian ready to appreciate the undertaking. A kind of peer review in the most literal sense of the term.
Other presentations and reviews of the volume essentially reproduced the same Manzoni: anything but moderate, cosmopolitan, politically innovative, the author of a work addressed to the people and capable of proposing a morality of individual responsibility. In a popular review by Isabel Mollard, the Promessi sposi were even described as a “colossal propaganda operation” through which Manzoni supposedly embedded an innovative and revolutionary political project in the novel.
All very suggestive.
Perhaps even a little too suggestive.
For when Romanzo popolare reached the desks of Italianists and, above all, professional Manzoni scholars, the atmosphere became — always in the most civilised manner — somewhat less celebratory.
Writing in Il Sole 24 Ore, Paola Bianchi welcomed it in an article with the eloquent title Oltre il melodramma. Manzoni e il romanzo popolare per fare la nazione. The enthusiasm is understandable: a historian of the early modern period demonstrating how fruitful it can be to read Manzoni as a historian finds another historian ready to appreciate the undertaking. A kind of peer review in the most literal sense of the term.
Other presentations and reviews of the volume essentially reproduced the same Manzoni: anything but moderate, cosmopolitan, politically innovative, the author of a work addressed to the people and capable of proposing a morality of individual responsibility. In a popular review by Isabel Mollard, the Promessi sposi were even described as a “colossal propaganda operation” through which Manzoni supposedly embedded an innovative and revolutionary political project in the novel.
All very suggestive.
Perhaps even a little too suggestive.
For when Romanzo popolare reached the desks of Italianists and, above all, professional Manzoni scholars, the atmosphere became — always in the most civilised manner — somewhat less celebratory.
The Manzoni scholars arrive
This deserves attention, since it prevents us from dismissing the matter as a simple disciplinary dispute. Bizzocchi’s book was indeed taken seriously by specialists.
Giorgio Panizza devoted a six-page review to it in the Rivista di studi manzoniani. He explicitly acknowledged its “merits as popular scholarship” and the effectiveness of its reading of a “modern” Manzoni, while identifying the question of Manzoni’s “patriotism” as a specific point requiring discussion.
The qualification is not a marginal one. The closer Manzoni is brought to political categories familiar to us, the more necessary it becomes to ask whether we are still entering his nineteenth century, or whether it is instead Manzoni who is being carefully escorted into our present.
Even more interesting is the case of Luca Badini Confalonieri, one of the foremost specialists in Manzoni’s work, who reviewed the volume in L’Indice dei libri del mese under a magnificently chosen title: Assassini che mangiano di magro [“Murderers Who Abstain from Meat”].
The phrase is Manzonian and hardly amounts to a celebration of religion’s ability automatically to generate a modern civic ethic. It is difficult not to appreciate a certain philological wickedness in the choice.
Gianmarco Gaspari, a historian of Italian literature and a scholar with long-standing expertise in Manzoni, also devoted a review to the volume in the Archivio Storico Lombardo. Maria Gabriella Riccobono discussed it in turn in a specialist Italianist venue.
In short, Italianists certainly did not ignore this incursion into their territory.
And perhaps it is precisely their intervention that brings the most interesting methodological problem into focus.
This is not a matter of the predictable corporate defence mounted by literary scholars against a historian who has entered their preserve. That would be too easy an explanation. The historian aiming at a bestseller, with an eye in primis to self-promotion, understandably tends to seek in the novel traces of the great questions that interest him: power, rights, nation, gender, the Enlightenment, civic morality. The philologist and the literary historian, but also the historian more attached to documentary verification and contextualisation, practise instead the less spectacular craft — and one far less suited to publishers’ blurbs — of repeatedly asking: where, precisely, does Manzoni say this? In what words? In which version of the text? Within which literary/cultural tradition? And to what extent can those words actually bear the meaning we wish to attribute to them?
Giorgio Panizza devoted a six-page review to it in the Rivista di studi manzoniani. He explicitly acknowledged its “merits as popular scholarship” and the effectiveness of its reading of a “modern” Manzoni, while identifying the question of Manzoni’s “patriotism” as a specific point requiring discussion.
The qualification is not a marginal one. The closer Manzoni is brought to political categories familiar to us, the more necessary it becomes to ask whether we are still entering his nineteenth century, or whether it is instead Manzoni who is being carefully escorted into our present.
Even more interesting is the case of Luca Badini Confalonieri, one of the foremost specialists in Manzoni’s work, who reviewed the volume in L’Indice dei libri del mese under a magnificently chosen title: Assassini che mangiano di magro [“Murderers Who Abstain from Meat”].
The phrase is Manzonian and hardly amounts to a celebration of religion’s ability automatically to generate a modern civic ethic. It is difficult not to appreciate a certain philological wickedness in the choice.
Gianmarco Gaspari, a historian of Italian literature and a scholar with long-standing expertise in Manzoni, also devoted a review to the volume in the Archivio Storico Lombardo. Maria Gabriella Riccobono discussed it in turn in a specialist Italianist venue.
In short, Italianists certainly did not ignore this incursion into their territory.
And perhaps it is precisely their intervention that brings the most interesting methodological problem into focus.
This is not a matter of the predictable corporate defence mounted by literary scholars against a historian who has entered their preserve. That would be too easy an explanation. The historian aiming at a bestseller, with an eye in primis to self-promotion, understandably tends to seek in the novel traces of the great questions that interest him: power, rights, nation, gender, the Enlightenment, civic morality. The philologist and the literary historian, but also the historian more attached to documentary verification and contextualisation, practise instead the less spectacular craft — and one far less suited to publishers’ blurbs — of repeatedly asking: where, precisely, does Manzoni say this? In what words? In which version of the text? Within which literary/cultural tradition? And to what extent can those words actually bear the meaning we wish to attribute to them?
It is a tiresome craft, but someone has to practise it.
The imperative of novelty
Here we probably reach the most debatable, but also the most interesting, aspect of the book.
Bizzocchi explicitly seeks to rescue Manzoni from received interpretations. There is nothing objectionable in this: without new questions being put to texts, historical and literary research would have little purpose.
The problem arises when the search for novelty seems to give way to something subtly different: the imperative of novelty.
A classic that has been studied for two centuries must somehow be made interesting again; to achieve this, it must be rediscovered; and for the rediscovery to be worthwhile, one must preferably demonstrate that the author was not what we thought he was.
Thus the moderate Manzoni becomes a radical; the Catholic Manzoni providentially preserves the best of the Enlightenment; the nineteenth-century Manzoni anticipates contemporary sensibilities; the apparently paternalistic Manzoni reveals an admirable concern for female autonomy.
By the end, one almost suspects that all that was missing to complete the update was an environmentalist Manzoni.
Naturally, the problem is not the attempt to say something new. The problem arises when novelty threatens to shift from being the result of the investigation to becoming its premise: when, that is, one no longer proceeds only from the sources towards a thesis, but also from the cultural and publishing requirement for a strong thesis towards the evidence capable of supporting it.
Bizzocchi explicitly seeks to rescue Manzoni from received interpretations. There is nothing objectionable in this: without new questions being put to texts, historical and literary research would have little purpose.
The problem arises when the search for novelty seems to give way to something subtly different: the imperative of novelty.
A classic that has been studied for two centuries must somehow be made interesting again; to achieve this, it must be rediscovered; and for the rediscovery to be worthwhile, one must preferably demonstrate that the author was not what we thought he was.
Thus the moderate Manzoni becomes a radical; the Catholic Manzoni providentially preserves the best of the Enlightenment; the nineteenth-century Manzoni anticipates contemporary sensibilities; the apparently paternalistic Manzoni reveals an admirable concern for female autonomy.
By the end, one almost suspects that all that was missing to complete the update was an environmentalist Manzoni.
Naturally, the problem is not the attempt to say something new. The problem arises when novelty threatens to shift from being the result of the investigation to becoming its premise: when, that is, one no longer proceeds only from the sources towards a thesis, but also from the cultural and publishing requirement for a strong thesis towards the evidence capable of supporting it.
And this is where Laterza enters the picture.
“If only”: when the subtitle is more confident than the author
A small episode recounted by Bizzocchi himself in his conversation with Barbero is particularly instructive.
Barbero observes that Laterza somehow presents the volume as a book about the Promessi sposi, whereas to him it seems rather to be a book about Manzoni more generally.
Bizzocchi replies with admirable candour that the title, subtitle, and cover are decided by the publisher, and recounts that when Come i «Promessi sposi» hanno fatto l'Italia was proposed to him, his reaction was essentially: “if only”.
The remark is amusing, but it says quite a lot.
The author, in fact, appears rather less certain of the thesis proclaimed by the subtitle than the subtitle itself.
There is nothing scandalous about this. These are publishing conventions, and it would be naïve to pretend that the titles and covers of books intended for a broad readership are conceived in the same way as those of an original and philologically rigorous monograph. Bizzocchi simply shows that he knows these rules and is prepared to adapt to them.
Yet this very adaptation deserves some reflection.
Contemporary highbrow popularisation seems increasingly to require historians not merely to explain something well, but to overturn an established assumption. The title must promise a discovery, preferably a counter-intuitive one. A familiar figure must turn out to have been different from what we thought. The book must contain a thesis that can be summarised in thirty seconds.
Bizzocchi seems to accept these conventions with a certain resigned nonchalance. There is nothing wrong with this so long as the packaging remains external to the research. Problems begin to arise if the logic of the packaging — novelty, topicality, reversal, a strong thesis — starts to influence the very way in which the past is interrogated.
The risk, then, is that one needs Manzoni to be modern before establishing just how modern he actually was.
Barbero observes that Laterza somehow presents the volume as a book about the Promessi sposi, whereas to him it seems rather to be a book about Manzoni more generally.
Bizzocchi replies with admirable candour that the title, subtitle, and cover are decided by the publisher, and recounts that when Come i «Promessi sposi» hanno fatto l'Italia was proposed to him, his reaction was essentially: “if only”.
The remark is amusing, but it says quite a lot.
The author, in fact, appears rather less certain of the thesis proclaimed by the subtitle than the subtitle itself.
There is nothing scandalous about this. These are publishing conventions, and it would be naïve to pretend that the titles and covers of books intended for a broad readership are conceived in the same way as those of an original and philologically rigorous monograph. Bizzocchi simply shows that he knows these rules and is prepared to adapt to them.
Yet this very adaptation deserves some reflection.
Contemporary highbrow popularisation seems increasingly to require historians not merely to explain something well, but to overturn an established assumption. The title must promise a discovery, preferably a counter-intuitive one. A familiar figure must turn out to have been different from what we thought. The book must contain a thesis that can be summarised in thirty seconds.
Bizzocchi seems to accept these conventions with a certain resigned nonchalance. There is nothing wrong with this so long as the packaging remains external to the research. Problems begin to arise if the logic of the packaging — novelty, topicality, reversal, a strong thesis — starts to influence the very way in which the past is interrogated.
The risk, then, is that one needs Manzoni to be modern before establishing just how modern he actually was.
“Renzo wanted”
Curiously enough, a practical demonstration of the text’s resistance comes not from an Italianist, but from another historian.
Once again, it is Barbero.
The terrain is that on which Bizzocchi’s argument perhaps appears most exposed: female autonomy.
Bizzocchi emphasises the importance assigned to the education of Renzo and Lucia’s children, boys and girls alike, as evidence of Manzoni’s modernity. Barbero draws his attention to an apparently insignificant detail. Manzoni writes:
“Renzo wanted”.
Renzo wanted them all to learn to read and write.
It is the husband, in other words, who decides.
Barbero then asks whether Bizzocchi’s interpretation might also be influenced by the greater sensitivity that we have today towards gender equality.
The question is gentle, almost incidental, but it goes straight to the heart of the problem. What we are delighted to find in Manzoni today is not always present in Manzoni with quite the same clarity with which we would like to find it there.
Bizzocchi can, of course, invoke the historical context. But another difficulty arises here: Barbero recalls that eighteenth-century European culture already contained representations of relations between men and women that were considerably more advanced.
Context, in short, cannot operate in only one direction: it cannot be transcended when the aim is to demonstrate how far Manzoni anticipated the future, and immediately reinstated when some element of the text instead appears irreducibly nineteenth-century.
It is precisely here that present-minded actualisation risks taking the place of historicisation.
And the paradox is particularly striking because the operation is being carried out by a historian.
Once again, it is Barbero.
The terrain is that on which Bizzocchi’s argument perhaps appears most exposed: female autonomy.
Bizzocchi emphasises the importance assigned to the education of Renzo and Lucia’s children, boys and girls alike, as evidence of Manzoni’s modernity. Barbero draws his attention to an apparently insignificant detail. Manzoni writes:
“Renzo wanted”.
Renzo wanted them all to learn to read and write.
It is the husband, in other words, who decides.
Barbero then asks whether Bizzocchi’s interpretation might also be influenced by the greater sensitivity that we have today towards gender equality.
The question is gentle, almost incidental, but it goes straight to the heart of the problem. What we are delighted to find in Manzoni today is not always present in Manzoni with quite the same clarity with which we would like to find it there.
Bizzocchi can, of course, invoke the historical context. But another difficulty arises here: Barbero recalls that eighteenth-century European culture already contained representations of relations between men and women that were considerably more advanced.
Context, in short, cannot operate in only one direction: it cannot be transcended when the aim is to demonstrate how far Manzoni anticipated the future, and immediately reinstated when some element of the text instead appears irreducibly nineteenth-century.
It is precisely here that present-minded actualisation risks taking the place of historicisation.
And the paradox is particularly striking because the operation is being carried out by a historian.
A subtitle that promises a great deal
Then there is the subtitle: Come i «Promessi sposi» hanno fatto l'Italia.
A magnificent formula. Its only drawback is that it promises a rather demanding demonstration.
To establish how a novel “made Italy”, one would in fact have to trace not only what Manzoni thought, but what Italians did with Manzoni: print runs, readers, schools, libraries, adaptations, appropriations, rejections, popular interpretations, political uses, and concrete practices of reading.
What would be required, in short, is a substantial history of reception.
Romanzo popolare mainly does something else, something that is in many respects interesting: it reconstructs Manzoni’s intellectual genealogy and shows how the Enlightenment, Catholicism, reflection on justice, national sentiment, and criticism of arbitrary power converge in the novel.
But demonstrating that Manzoni wished to contribute morally to the construction of Italy and demonstrating that the Promessi sposi actually “made the Italians” are not quite the same thing.
And it is curious that Bizzocchi himself, with that “if only”, inadvertently provides the best cautionary footnote to his own subtitle.
Between the cover and the author, in short, the author appears to be the more cautious of the two.
A magnificent formula. Its only drawback is that it promises a rather demanding demonstration.
To establish how a novel “made Italy”, one would in fact have to trace not only what Manzoni thought, but what Italians did with Manzoni: print runs, readers, schools, libraries, adaptations, appropriations, rejections, popular interpretations, political uses, and concrete practices of reading.
What would be required, in short, is a substantial history of reception.
Romanzo popolare mainly does something else, something that is in many respects interesting: it reconstructs Manzoni’s intellectual genealogy and shows how the Enlightenment, Catholicism, reflection on justice, national sentiment, and criticism of arbitrary power converge in the novel.
But demonstrating that Manzoni wished to contribute morally to the construction of Italy and demonstrating that the Promessi sposi actually “made the Italians” are not quite the same thing.
And it is curious that Bizzocchi himself, with that “if only”, inadvertently provides the best cautionary footnote to his own subtitle.
Between the cover and the author, in short, the author appears to be the more cautious of the two.
Four years later
Let us return, then, to the question with which we began.
What remains, in 2026, of Romanzo popolare?
Certainly an intelligent, learned, enjoyable, and provocative book, which had the not inconsiderable merit of forcing historians and Italianists to discuss once again the political dimension of the Promessi sposi. It also remains an effective demonstration of Bizzocchi’s ability to write for a non-specialist readership without turning popularisation into trivialisation.
What is less clear is whether the strong thesis has survived.
The initial reception was intense: newspaper reviews, public events, interviews, discussions with prominent scholars, and initiatives also connected with the Manzoni sesquicentennial of 2023. Italianists took the book seriously and discussed it. Laterza reissued it in 2024.
But today we may legitimately ask whether that discussion gave rise to a new phase of Manzoni studies founded on Bizzocchi’s “radical Manzoni”; whether his interpretation has become a point of reference; whether it has generated a line of research; or whether its greatest effectiveness remained tied to the favourable promotional season in which the book appeared.
The question remains open. But the mere fact that it can be asked four years later says something about the increasingly complicated relationship between publishing success and historiographical durability.
Not everything that makes a great deal of noise upon publication is destined to last; yet it would be equally simplistic to measure a book’s value solely by the number of subsequent citations. Some books report new discoveries and original hypotheses, at times important enough to open up entirely new fields of research; others are books of occasion, capable of brilliantly formulating a provocation addressed above all to their own present.
Perhaps Romanzo popolare belongs more to the second category than to the first.
And perhaps it is precisely here that it reveals both its most interesting feature and its principal limitation. Bizzocchi sets out to historicise Manzoni and at times ends up actualising him; he seeks to rescue him from the old rhetoric of the schoolroom and returns him to us surprisingly compatible with much of the civic rhetoric of the present; he attacks one monument and, almost without noticing it, constructs another.
Only a much more likeable one.
Ultimately, there is a subtle but decisive difference between asking new questions of the classics and needing the classics to provide new answers. In the first case, research puts our categories to the test. In the second, our categories risk forcing the past into line.
The old Don Lisander — a Lombard aristocrat, a tormented Catholic, a liberal sui generis, an heir to the Enlightenment, and a man irreducibly of the nineteenth century — might ultimately prove even more interesting than his 2.0 update.
And, above all, he had not read Engels.
What remains, in 2026, of Romanzo popolare?
Certainly an intelligent, learned, enjoyable, and provocative book, which had the not inconsiderable merit of forcing historians and Italianists to discuss once again the political dimension of the Promessi sposi. It also remains an effective demonstration of Bizzocchi’s ability to write for a non-specialist readership without turning popularisation into trivialisation.
What is less clear is whether the strong thesis has survived.
The initial reception was intense: newspaper reviews, public events, interviews, discussions with prominent scholars, and initiatives also connected with the Manzoni sesquicentennial of 2023. Italianists took the book seriously and discussed it. Laterza reissued it in 2024.
But today we may legitimately ask whether that discussion gave rise to a new phase of Manzoni studies founded on Bizzocchi’s “radical Manzoni”; whether his interpretation has become a point of reference; whether it has generated a line of research; or whether its greatest effectiveness remained tied to the favourable promotional season in which the book appeared.
The question remains open. But the mere fact that it can be asked four years later says something about the increasingly complicated relationship between publishing success and historiographical durability.
Not everything that makes a great deal of noise upon publication is destined to last; yet it would be equally simplistic to measure a book’s value solely by the number of subsequent citations. Some books report new discoveries and original hypotheses, at times important enough to open up entirely new fields of research; others are books of occasion, capable of brilliantly formulating a provocation addressed above all to their own present.
Perhaps Romanzo popolare belongs more to the second category than to the first.
And perhaps it is precisely here that it reveals both its most interesting feature and its principal limitation. Bizzocchi sets out to historicise Manzoni and at times ends up actualising him; he seeks to rescue him from the old rhetoric of the schoolroom and returns him to us surprisingly compatible with much of the civic rhetoric of the present; he attacks one monument and, almost without noticing it, constructs another.
Only a much more likeable one.
Ultimately, there is a subtle but decisive difference between asking new questions of the classics and needing the classics to provide new answers. In the first case, research puts our categories to the test. In the second, our categories risk forcing the past into line.
The old Don Lisander — a Lombard aristocrat, a tormented Catholic, a liberal sui generis, an heir to the Enlightenment, and a man irreducibly of the nineteenth century — might ultimately prove even more interesting than his 2.0 update.
And, above all, he had not read Engels.
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