Second marriage

Manzoni’s home life after the death of his first wife Henriette led him to consider remarrying, encouraged by his friend Tommaso Grossi. His choice, approved by his mother Giulia Beccaria, was Teresa Borri, widow of Count Decio Stampa. Teresa’s married name led to wordplay within the family (stampa = the press), with Manzoni joining in by joking that he too “was limiting the freedom of the press”. Teresa had an eighteen-year-old son, Stefano, who had been taught by Luigi Rossari, a close friend of Manzoni. The marriage took place on 2 January 1837. His second wife was very unlike Henrietta in both culture and personality, and took a completely different attitude to her famous husband’s public role as great writer and scholar. Living within her confined domestic space, the unobtrusive Henriette had taken nothing to do with her husband’s cultural and literary affairs. Teresa, on the other hand, took charge of her husband’s literary role, by attending to his “image” and future memory (it was she who asked the famous painter Francesco Hayez to paint a portrait of Manzoni), by intervening in important decisions regarding his writing (she supported and attended to the project on the illustrated edition of the Promessi Sposi), and also by taking meticulous care of her husband’s works (as of items and relics of value), especially the numerous manuscripts and fragments in Manzoni’s own hand (frequently accompanied by the explicit certification that the text had been given to her by Alessandro Manzoni). On the via del Morone or at the villa at Brusuglio she was a rather more authoritative figure than the humble and resigned Henriette had been, which led to many a clash with the other dominant figure in the Manzoni household, namely, his mother Giulia. Moreover, Teresa’s son Stefano was reluctant to integrate into the new family. Manzoni’s second wife died in August 1861, and was buried not at Brusuglio along with the other members of Manzoni’s family, but at Lesa, on Lake Maggiore.