I Promessi Sposi: minor characters

Lucia’s mother, Agnese, occupies considerable space in the novel and is characterized in detail. Her brand of popular wisdom and life experience come to the fore when she organizes and directs the sham of the clandestine marriage (which ends in a clash with her daughter, who rejects trickery and scheming). Perpetua is another down-to-earth woman, with a clearly-defined personality. She is Don Abbondio’s servant, a gossip who never stops talking, and knows the right advice to give the priest, but she is less cunning than Agnese in the farce of the surprise marriage. Don Ferrante is a noble and apparently minor character; together with his wife Donna Prassede he offers Lucia hospitality in Milan. He is a classic representative (together with the un-named author) of the superficial, formalistic and pompous seventeenth century culture that lies housed in a library with books volumes on chivalry and witchcraft, and numerous books on astrology which provide this droll man of letters with absurd explanations on the origin of the plague. Two bravoes, Griso and Nibbio (respectively, manservants to Don Rodrigo and the Innominato), are also important to the plot. Manzoni seems to be attributing Griso with a special symbolic function when he shows him (in Chapter XI) intent on reconstructing the events of the notte degli imbrogli (“night of deception”) in order to report them to Don Rodrigo: in a sense Griso becomes a grotesque “double” of the historical novelist, whose purpose it is to reconstruct the facts on the basis of documentary evidence and create an ordered account of them. Count Zio and Father Provinciale are two perfect incarnations of political intrigues and the dishonesty of political jargon (not only of the seventeenth century), each intent on asserting their power in a diplomatic dialogue full of allusions and evasive comments, whose comic element is conveyed in full by the author. The “crowd” plays the role of a collective character, expressing the tragic and the comic with extraordinary power. Manzoni is a true master in depicting the gestures, psychology and language of the masses.