Una Tragica Parodia. Il Rifacimento Daveroniano de I Promessi Sposi di Alessandro Manzoni

Abstract

The established critical view is that the wide popularity of Guido da Verona, the novelist who sold more copies of his books than any other in Italy during the early twentieth century, was fatally destroyed by his parody of Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi, which was published in 1930. Da Verona's book was burned in public and then withdrawn. The writer became a victim of ferocious persecution by the Fascists. His previous novels also became unpopular and he died poor (perhaps suicidal) and forgotten in 1939. This study argues, on the basis of unpublished and unknown documents from da Verona's archive), that his parody of Manzoni's book was merely used as a pretext by the Fascist authorities for retaliation against a writer who was considered dangerous by the regime. Strangely enough, even though the regime saw his novels as spreading ideas which in no way fitted the Fascist mould that Mussolini wanted all Italians to embrace, the writer himself had for more than ten years been convinced that he was a good Fascist. His parody of Manzoni's masterpiece was actually well realized and relatively harmless and would have been unlikely to cause much reaction if da Verona had not been already seen as a menace to Fascism.