The young Alessandro dedicated or sent to Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828), the most famous and admired contemporary poet, some of his early poems, which make use of themes and forms typical of the “neoclassical” period in Italian literature and art. Monti’s influence is evident in early poems such as Trionfo della Libertà and Urania. Manzoni became acquainted with Monti during his “Milanese period”, namely, after his “Roman period” (anti-revolutionary and anti-French), when he fled to Milan after a short stay in Paris, and wrote works full of the heroic and triumphant classicism of the Napoleonic period. It was Monti who encouraged his friends Giulia Beccaria and Carlo Imbonati to invite the young Alessandro to Paris, having already noted his talent as a poet. In Milan from 1801 to 1805, Manzoni frequented Monti in a close-knit literary circle of friends of neoclasssical persuasion, such as Ignazio Calderari and the Greek Andrea Mustoxidi. This group in part reformed when Manzoni returned from his first stay in Paris, after 1810, continuing to discuss current literary matters with a frequency and intensity that caused Canon Tosi to worry that literature was having a detrimental effect on Manzioni’s faith. In 1810, reunited with Monti and his other friends (and now including Giuseppe Bossi and Gaetano Giudici), Manzoni spoke of idyllic European poetry and praised Monti’s recent translation of the Iliad. Later, after his religion conversion and literary conversion, there was a clear distance between Monti and Manzoni, both as regards the language question and literary choices (in his Sulla mitologia of 1825, Monti defended classicism). In 1828, the Milanese journal Eco published a quatrain in hendecasyllable verse by Manzoni for Vincenzo Monti’s death, reiterating the praise (the comparison to Dante) already paid to Monti in the first of Manzoni’s early poems.

Andrea Appiani, Vincenzo Monti [Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan]