The terms vero and verità (“truth”) are found even in Manzoni’s early poetic output. In the Carme for Imbonati he talks of il santo Vero (“the holy Truth”). The term is used to refer to something abstract, without any precise philosophical or theological content. His discussion with the French Idéologues provided him with some substance but did not fully satisfy his spiritual and well as intellectual need to know and communicate the truth. His religious conversion, on the surface like some miraculous gift, but in actual fact the outcome of intense meditation, revealed an absolute truth: the truth of Christianity as written in the pages of the Old and New Testaments. Manzoni’s religious conversion was followed almost by necessity by his literary conversion: his Inni Sacri celebrate the truth of faith. But for such a restless thinker and a writer so dissatisfied with his achievements, pure celebration of the “ideal” was not enough. Manzoni aimed to represent that ideal in History, in the conviction that this would reveal the underlying design of divine Providence to the poet who reconstructed it faithfully and fully. Historical drama was the new literary tool used by Manzoni to represent and communicate to readers or spectators the truth of History. But his two tragedies, the Carmagnola and especially the Adelchi, show up the contradiction behind Manzoni’s literary and ethical-religious undertaking. History shows itself to be dominated by the forces of evil, upon which the light of the Gospels, consisting of faith and reason, has no influence whatsoever. This light, which is not part of historical reality, is in a sense “inserted” there by the author through the moral reflection of the Choruses and the creation of idealized figures such as the Count, Adelchi and Ermengarda. In the tragedies, two truths are juxtaposed: historical “reality” and the poet’s Christian “ideal”. The contradiction is resolved in his novel’s “ideal history”, in a “verisimilar” world where the truth of faith makes (or appears to make) sense of events and characters.