The Neapolitan exiles

At the beginning of 1801, at the age of sixteen, Manzoni wrote a poem with four cantos, Del trionfo della libertà (“Liberty triumphant”, the first of his early poems). Already mature in his knowledge of literature, he modelled his poem on Monti, expressing libertarian and Jabobin leanings of an abstract sort, fuelled by adolescent rebellion. In the following months, however, in a city where the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and national independence were being contradicted by the political interests of the Napoleonic regime, the young Manzoni’s enthusiasm was somewhat dampened and his evaluation rather more critical. An important role in this phase was played by his contact with two Neapolitan exiles, namely two of the southern intellectuals that had set up the short-lived Parthenopean Republic of 1799 and who had escaped the bloody Bourbon repression: Francesco Lomonaco (1772- 1810) and Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823). Having played a major role in a failed revolution, they testified to the fact that the Enlightenment theories of a small group of intellectuals were not enough to change a complex reality. In Naples, as Cuoco had shown in Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, those theories had not involved the masses: in their cultural and social backwardness, the people had in fact supported the feudal government of the Bourbons rather than their “liberators”. These exiles infused Manzoni and Lombard culture with Giambattista’s Vico’s ideas: with his profound sense of the process of history and the need to trace the facts of human history to a single principle that makes sense of them (for Manzoni this principle was to be divine Providence), Vico provided an antidote for abstract idealism. Cuoco also gave Manzoni his “archeological” novel to read: this work, Platone in Italia, was one of Manzoni’s sources for the Promessi Sposi. Manzoni dedicated the sonnet Per la vita di Dante to Lomonaco (who also influenced Foscolo), in praise of his Vite degli eccellenti italiani (1802).