The villa at Brusuglio

Manzoni wrote most of his great masterpiece at Brusuglio, in the Lecco area. The villa had belonged to Count Carlo Imbonati, who had left it to Giulia Beccaria. Manzoni had the villa renovated, devoting particular attention to the garden, increasing it in size and planting it with rare and precious plants. He planted a number of robinia trees and it may well be thanks to him that this species first spread in Italy. According to an anecdote, while Alessandro and Henriette were strolling along the garden path one day, Henriette saw two young robinia plants at the border, close to each other but separate, and twisted them together as a good omen for their married life together. Manzoni himself was a competent botanist, as demonstrated by the techniques deployed in his garden at Brusuglio (also mentioned in his letters) and by his notes for an essay entitled Saggio di nomenclatura botanica (among his unpublished writings on language), which aimed to reform Linneo’s way of defining individual species of plants, a usage adopted by all naturalists. But perhaps the garden at Brusuglio, with its wealth of plants, flowers and colours, was the real-life equivalent of a remarkable moment of invention in the Promessi Sposi. Just as his father’s villa at Caleotto may have influenced Manzoni’s description of the landscape in the first chapter of his novel, the “botanic garden” at Brusuglio may well have led to the magnificent description of Renzo’s vineyard in the second part of Chapter XXXIII, where many different plants and flowers are listed and named with precise botanical detail, and where we find the novel’s first burst of spring energy, which then turns into an aggressive sprawl of weeds and plants that are harmful to weaker plants, pointing to a pessimistic allegory of the world.