Casa Manzoni

Alessandro Manzoni wasn’t born here. He was born in Milan in 1785, but not in this house. He moved to Via Morone in 1813 after marrying Enrichetta Blondel, and this is where he lived for the next sixty years, where he wrote I Promessi Sposi, Italy’s most famous novel, and where he died in 1873 after falling down the steps of San Fedele church. The house became a museum in 1965, preserved exactly as Manzoni left it: his study, his bedroom, his library of over 40,000 volumes including annotated drafts of his own work. The furniture is original. The books are his. You can see the desk where he revised his novel obsessively, rewriting it in Florentine Italian to help unify the language of a newly unified Italy. One house. Six decades of literary history. One writer who believed a novel could teach a fractured country how to speak the same tongue.