The "silent period"                                                     

The publication of the illustrated edition of the Promessi Sposi and the Storia della colonna infame (1842) marked the start of Manzoni’s long “silent period”. This silence was not total, however, for his literary output continued in the form of various poems. Nonetheless, apart from compositions such as his unfinished Ognissanti and the Strofe per una prima Comunione, modelled on his Inni Sacri, the handful of other texts consists of occasional poems, at times in the form of humorous epigrams, such as the couple of lines in 1872 in which he jokes about his aging condition. In this “second” phase of his life, Manzoni took a keen interest in linguistics, philosophy and history, and considered writing literature to be a secondary and futile activity. In a dialogue reported by Ruggero Bonghi that took place at Rosmini’s villa at Stresa, Manzoni commented negatively on his poem on the Eucharist saying that “poems should be written when you’re young”. Manzoni’s “silent period” after the achievement of his novel is the silence of the strong creative impulse that had guided him from his sacred and civic poems and historical dramas to the writing and rewriting of his novel. His inspiration and the ethical commitment that was part of it had come to an end, as had his trust in the capacity of literary invention to represent, truth, whether historical reality or the more profound truth of the “human heart”, without falsification or artifice. This distrust in fact dated to the 1830s, after his novel was first published. In the famous letter of 1832 to Marco Coen, a young Venetian who had asked him for advice on his own literary vocation of which his banker father disapproved, Manzoni replied pessimistically, disenchanting the young man and dissuading him from literary pursuits, which were neither good nor true but purely “a fantasy game”, offering nothing of use in human existence. Yet only five years earlier Manzoni had completed and published his “fantasy” masterpiece.