In February 1860, Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Sardinia, appointed Manzoni as senator. The news reached Manzoni via a letter from Camillo Cavour, Minister for the Interior. Manzoni also received a rail pass which he seldom used, although he did use it to travel to Turin to pronounce his oath and when he returned to Turin in February 1861 to vote in favour of the law conferring the title of King of Italy on Vittorio Emanuele. For his merits, Manzoni received the honorary award of Gran Cordone mauriziano and a State pension. In March 1862, Garibaldi visited him at his home. In August 1861, his second wife died. To be near his father who was now alone, Pietro Manzoni moved with his family to the house on the via del Morone. During this time restoration work was carried out on the house, including the rebuilding of the façade that looks out onto piazza Belgioioso, much admired today. Manzoni, who had been nominated honorary president of the Istituto Lombardo and honorary member of the Pio Istituto Tipografico in Milan, pursued his work as a scholar, devoting himself to a comparative analysis of two historical moments that were crucial for Europe and Italy, namely the French revolution and the Italian uprising of 1859. In 1870, in connection with the reprinting of Opere varie, the typographer noticed that Manzoni’s letter to Boccardo of 1860 (dealing with an issue related to “so-called literary property”, or copyright) had mistakenly been printed twice. As a solution, Manzoni decided to insert his letter On Romanticism, written then set aside back in 1823. In the 1860s, Manzoni was particularly committed to arriving at a theoretical and legislative conclusion to the longstanding issue of a unified language for Italy, putting to good use the “eternal work” on language that had taken him three decades of study.

Photograph of Alessandro Manzoni in 1872 [in Immagini di casa Manzoni, edited by J. Riva, Milan, Centro Nazionale Studi Manzoniani, 1999, n. 41]

.