Alessandro Manzoni

Manzoni was the grandson of Cesare Beccaria, the Enlightenment jurist whose writing against torture and capital punishment shaped European law; after a youth of skepticism, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion in his twenties that redirected his writing toward devout Catholic conviction. The Betrothed, first published in 1827, made him famous overnight as the founder of the modern Italian novel.

Not satisfied with his own Lombard-inflected prose, he spent years afterward, in what he called 'rinsing his clothes in the Arno,' rewriting the entire novel into the Florentine Tuscan he believed should become standard literary Italian, republishing the revised text in the early 1840s. The project helped set the template for the unified national language that followed Italy's political unification decades later.

When he died in 1873, Verdi composed his Requiem in tribute, premiered on the first anniversary of Manzoni's death.