Doodlewatch

Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (March 7, 1785 – May 22, 1873) was an Italian poet and novelist. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed, one of the major works of World literature.

Manzoni was born in Milan, Italy, on March 7, 1785. Pietro, his father, aged about fifty, belonged to an old family of Lecco, originally feudal lords of Barzio, in the Valsassina. The poet’s maternal grandfather,Cesare Beccaria, was a well-known author, and his mother Giulia had literary talent as well.

Alessandro Manzoni was a slow developer, and at the various colleges he attended, he was considered a dunce. At fifteen, however, he developed a passion for poetry, and wrote two sonnets of considerable merit. Upon the death of his father in 1805, he joined his mother at Auteuil, and spent two years mixing with the literary set of the so-called “ideologues“, philosophers of the 18th century school, among whom he made many friends, notably Claude Charles Fauriel. There too he imbibed the anti-Catholic creed of Voltairianism, and only after his marriage, under the influence of his wife, did he exchange it for a ferventCatholicism.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Manzoni