Correspondence with Rosmini

The correspondence between Manzoni and Rosmini testifies to a friendship described by Fogazzaro in an epigraph of 1905 as the “dual vertex of a single flame”. Going beyond the Risorgimento rhetoric surrounding their bond, and beyond the inevitable rhetoric on the shared religious ideas that drew the souls of two great men together, this collection of correspondence clarifies the reasons underlying their friendship, which started in 1826 and lasted up to Rosmini’s death in July 1855. The 27 letters from Manzoni and 40 letters from Rosmini not only confirm and further substantiate the latter’s well-known influence on Manzoni, but also throw light on Manzoni’s influence on Rosmini, pointing to a further dimension of their famous intellectual bond. Initially it was the young priest that moved towards the acclaimed writer, and later Manzoni who felt the need to learn from Rosmini. The underlying Rosminian thinking is clear in Manzoni’s dialogue Dell’Invenzione, which represents the point of arrival in Manzoni’s meditation on the problem of truth. Less evident are the changes or corrections that Rosmini’s thinking undergoes as a result of his intense dialogue (by letter or during their walks by the lakeside) with Manzoni, although the latter’s philosophical doubts on the origin of the idea of being and the origin of language led Rosmini to clarify his own theoretical system. Manzoni also lessened Rosmini’s explicitly Jansenist and anti-Jesuit ideas (while sharing his friend’s intellectual and moral rigour in matters of faith and Christian that were a feature of Jansenism). As regards the “language question”, although Rosmini was originally a classicist and a purist, he was to some extent attracted by the Florentine-based solution deployed by Manzoni in the Promessi Sposi, a book that he greatly admired.