Starting in 1806, a large number of letters passed between Manzoni and Fauriel. Today, 102 of these letters remain, with 89 written by Manzoni and 23 by Fauriel. Manzoni did not preserve many of Fauriel’s letters, and one melancholy day even destroyed some letters from his old friend along with some early writings. Besides revealing an aspect of Manzoni’s complex character, this episode may also be linked to the somewhat mysterious final period of their friendship, when their correspondence decreased from 1827 and came to an almost complete stop in 1840. Their correspondence was most frequent during the years when Manzoni was most engrossed in reflection on aesthetics and literature, and at the height of his creative output. Together with some of Manzoni’s Milanese friends, Fauriel was an important interlocutor for Manzoni, whose search for new forms and genres of literary expression extended to the broader European cultural context. Among the most significant letters are those that accompany the entire project of the Promessi Sposi. A letter to Fauriel of 29 January 1821 contains the first evidence of Manzoni’s change of opinion on the novel, a genre he criticized in his Lettre to Chauvet (drafted in Paris and left with Fauriel for corrections), considering it to be untruthful on account of its inability to represent historical truth. In the letter he informs Fauriel of the literary innovations within the Milanese Romantic circles, and deals in particular with a historical poem on the Crusades on which Tommaso Grossi was working. Grossi’s intention was a novelty for Italy, and similar to Walter Scott’s intention in Ivanhoe, namely, to depict an era by means of an invented tale. Clearly sharing this goal, Manzoni adds a statement expressing his new poetics of the historical novel: “Combine the characteristic features of a society in a particular era and develop them into an action, making use of History without competing with it […]: this is what I think poetry can still do”.

Letter from Manzoni to Fauriel, 7 March 1808 [in Annali Manzoniani, new series, II, 1994, p. 96]