Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi e l’economia milanese del Seicento

The matchless fortune of Alessandro Manzoni’s masterpiece "The Betrothed", due to the mandatory reading in all the Italian schools, is responsible for the negative, prejudicial and enduring image of Milan in the seventeenth century. This essay aims to dismantle such a picture of decline, by tracing Manzoni's ideas of economics and by uncovering the political reasons that supported the novelist’s representation of backwardness. Indeed, first Manzoni developed a moralized view of economics, in which free market prices embodied Providence, and any other kind of intervention was regarded as not proper. Second, he depicted the seventeenth century Milanese society in a very static way in order to over-emphasize progres of his time. Thus, due to Manzoni's moralized economic approach and historical reconstruction, the Spanish domination of Milan met its doom of rough justice. Yet, a new generation of historians, free from any teleological slant, is now providing a new vision of Spanish Milan as a resilient and lively society, with some institutions conducive to modernization.