Storia della colonna infame

In the definitive edition (1840-42) of the Promessi Sposi, the text of the novel was followed by the Storia della colonna infame (History of the Column of Infamy). The word Fine (The End) comes not at the end of the novel, but after the last line of the Storia, thereby marking the continuity between the narrative of the novel and the historiographic text that followed it. Indeed, for Manzoni the two texts were closely linked. The Storia della colonna infame was intended to throw light on an obscure event mentioned in Chapters XXXI and XXXII of the novel but not described in depth. It is the story of the trials held in Milan in 1630 against the untori, namely those accused – on the basis of a superstitious belief shared not only by the common people - of spreading the plague by dabbing poisonous ointment on doors and walls in the city. To force the untori (“plague-spreaders”) to confess to crimes they had not committed, the judges subjected them to horrific tortures before sentencing them to equally horrific deaths. The home of one of the main defendants in the trial, a barber named Giangiacomo Mora, was razed to the ground and a column build in its place, with an inscription recalling the infamy of the blame attributed to Mora and the other men that were condemned along with him. The column was demolished in 1778. Driven by an irrepressible urge to find out the truth, and above all to try to understand what went on in the minds of the judges to induce them to behave in such an rational and inhuman way, Manzoni painstakingly reconstructs the details of the entire judicial procedure, with the interrogations carried out, the tortures inflicted, the men’s desperate replies. Unlike Pietro Verri, whose Osservazioni sulla tortura (1777) had attributed the judges’ behaviour to the ignorance of the times and the existence of torture, Manzoni believed that the judges could have listened to their own conscience, and therefore that it was morally wrong of them to have allowed themselves to be intimidated by the people’s fury against the untori, going as far as to abuse torture when in fact the legislation of the time invited caution in resorting to torture.