The Novelist and the Archivist

Fiction and History in Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed

C. Povolo

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137395993
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

In the 19th century, Alessandro Manzoni dedicated himself to writing the novel I promessi sposi that encouraged the Italian Risorgimento. This book traces how the renowned novelist was inspired by an event that occurred at the beginning of the 17th century, which he came to know about thanks to the secret collaboration of a Venetian archivist.

1

From History to Fiction

Abstract: The author examines the surprising coincidences between Manzoni’s great novel and the trial held between 1605 and 1607 by order of an important Venetian magistracy for a series of violent acts and rapes committed against the population of a small village of the Veneto hinterland. The protagonists and the events found in the records of the trial follow the same narrative structure as the novel. These coincidences lead us to suspect that Manzoni had somehow been able to consult the records of this criminal trial, which along with many other documents had been transferred to the great archive of the Venetian Frari after the fall of the Serenissima. The comparison of the novel with the trial is illuminating, as it allows us to grasp the complex interrelations between history and narrative and, among reality, verisimilitude and imagination.

Keywords: History; Fiction; Novel; Narrative; I Promessi Sposi; Criminal Trial; Truth and verisimilitude; Archives; Venice

Povolo, Claudio. The Novelist and the Archivist: Fiction and History in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137395993.0004.

Our story begins sometime in late August or early September 1605, in a small village in the Venetian terraferma, the northern Italian mainland territories that Venice had brought under its rule over the course of the 15th century. A series of events in this village, just to the south of Vicenza, had quite suddenly reawakened distant conflicts and tensions and led to the opening of a criminal trial.¹

The political and judicial authorities in Vicenza were responsible for this proceeding, but the order to undertake it came from much further away, from Venice and, in particular, from the Council of Ten, the highest judicial authority of the Republic.² Sometime around the middle of August, two representatives of the village travelled to the capital to denounce Paolo Orgiano and several other members of the local aristocracy, who were also the largest landowners in the area, for a series of violent and abusive acts. Their earlier attempts to denounce the aggressions to the local municipal authorities had been ignored, and nothing had been done to stop Orgiano and his followers. Now in their denunciation to the Council of Ten, the townsmen presented a long list of offenses, some of which dated back several years. It was impossible, they complained, to count the number of rapes and abuses of the young women from the town, of the fiancés and husbands who had been beaten up when they dared to resist, the marriages that had been called off and the young men and women who had been forced to marry and abandon the town. They asked that the highest authority in the Republic put an end to the violence and above all grant justice to those who had already fallen victim to it.³

The preamble to the community’s denunciation, presented to the Venetian Collegio on 19 August 1605, reads as follows:

Most Serene Prince, our town of Orgiano, in the territory of Vicenza, seat of 600 homes and set in fertile land, should call itself happy, nonetheless certain citizens of Vicenza also live there who wish to forget that they too are your Serene Highness’ subjects; they tyrannize we poor people of the said town and everything we own, Most Serene Prince, we have endured countless insults to our persons, and the oppression of these despots has become unbearable. They think they have every right to violate our virgin daughters, destroy the honor of widows and rape even our sisters and wives, so that we are no longer safe in our own homes, and furthermore we must pay public taxes as well, or denounce to the forces of justice the crimes that take place in our town, our public officials are beaten, wounded and killed, so that we are forced to abandon our homes, if we are not aided by the high wisdom and mercy of your Serene Highness. ...

There follows a long list of “homicides, rapes, aggressions and abuse of men and women of the community of Orgiano on the part of nobleman Paolo Orgiano of Vicenza and his companions and bravi.”⁴

Orgiano lays at the far edge of the Colli Berici, the range of hills that lies between Lake Garda and the Alps. For the entire period in which it was ruled by Venice, it was the centre of an administrative district (vicariate), one of the local jurisdictions into which most of the territory around Vicenza was subdivided.⁵ According to a privilege granted by the Venetian Republic, the city of Vicenza would periodically send a member of the city council to Orgiano as vicar, where he exercised a limited number of civil and judicial responsibilities. However, even after the beginning of Venetian dominion, Vicenza maintained powers over Orgiano, both political and judicial, that were reinforced by the vast landholdings of the urban aristocracy.⁶ In spite of the vast possessions of the city’s local nobility, a class of small landowners and merchants was still clearly present towards the end of the 16th century. Venetians had taken over in the bordering Liona river valley. The soil was extremely fertile and favoured the cultivation of cereals, which by means of rivers and canals could be sent directly to the Venetian marketplace. This and other developments during the 16th century allowed the rise of a small but active group of rural intermediaries, who quickly assumed an important role within the community.⁷

Families like the Fracanzan, the Orgiano and the Dalla Banca had long since decamped to Vicenza, where they took on an important role in political affairs, a monopoly that they enjoyed together with a small group of other aristocratic families, and the fact that the vicar often came from among their ranks was emblematic of their political and economic power and social prestige. The Fracanzan and Orgiano families succeeded in maintaining a monopoly of power within the vicariate during the 1570s, causing a long-lasting feud with the Dalla Banca family. In 1575 Settimio Fracanzan and Teseo Orgiano assassinated Giuseppe Dalla Banca, whose family, through a farsighted strategy of advantageous marriages and occupation of the post of vicar, had become an undesirable competitor. In order to prevent the intervention of Venice, the two first murdered their hired assassin and then formed an unbreakable pact by the marriage of Settimio Fracanzan’s sister Elena with Teseo Orgiano. From this union Paolo Orgiano was born in 1579. Upon the untimely death of his parents, the child was brought up by his uncle Settimio. At the time of the trial Paolo was 26.⁸

From the beginning of its expansion onto the terraferma, the Venetian Republic had granted a wide degree of autonomy to its subject territories. In the large cities of the Po river valley, local noblemen had been allowed to maintain control over the institutions of their cities and consequently had preserved their authority over their clienteles for most of the 16th century. During that very period, however, several changes occurred that included not only economic shifts but also more profound social and political transformations. Venice had extended its own sphere of influence by incorporating new interests, as pressure from below from emergent groups with their propensity to question traditional power structures had become increasingly noticeable. Driven by this redefinition of social and political relations, the judicial activity of the Council of Ten intensified between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. And the figure of the violent and abusive nobleman, locked in an arrogant pursuit of his own criminal interests, became a central character of the judicial record, the symbol of an aristocratic society in the midst of a profound crisis.⁹

The contents of a trial

The trial of Paolo Orgiano was therefore not an isolated case. Authorities in the most important cities of the terraferma reported a number of judicial proceedings against members of the local nobility during the same period. Interference in marriage contracts, rape, assault and extortion were the most frequently cited among the many offenses for which subjects appealed to the highest judicial body of the state.¹⁰

Yet, apart from these detailed and precise pieces of testimony, very few traces of the activity of the Council of Ten have remained. Among the handful of trials that have survived, that of Paolo Orgiano stands out not only for its length (some 559 pages) but also for the amount of testimony recorded during the two years in which it took place, for both the prosecution and the defence.¹¹ It is a precious source that possesses an immense symbolic value and which represents an entire era and its transformations.¹²

This trial possesses, however, at least one other element of significance, that goes beyond its unquestionable historical interest – an element I discovered entirely by chance, but which nonetheless deserves to be taken into consideration.¹³ The trial’s plot, or rather its narrative structure, bears surprising analogies to a much more famous text written some two centuries later, for entirely different purposes: the novel The Betrothed (I promessi sposi) by Alessandro Manzoni, or, more accurately, the earlier version of this novel that Manzoni had entitled Renzo and Lucia – a work he seems to have first conceived during the spring of 1821.¹⁴

The preliminary stage of the trial against Paolo Orgiano began and ended in September 1605.¹⁵ During this period Orgiano himself was placed under arrest, and his victims and other witnesses presented their version of the facts. The arrest took place at night at Orgiano’s palace, at the end of a feast attended by numerous guests. The captain of the police declared that in taking the accused away, “the peasants rejoiced at the apprehension of the said Orgiano, saying that he had committed so many misdeeds that they couldn’t be counted.”¹⁶ Shortly thereafter the Council of Ten ordered the transfer of Orgiano to Venice and a few months later the trial was moved to the Pretorian Court in Padua.¹⁷ After several interrogations of the accused and the examination of the witnesses in his defence, the decision of the court was handed down in the autumn of 1607. It was a harsh verdict: Paolo Orgiano was sentenced to incarceration for life, in the prisons of the Council of Ten.¹⁸

Let us consider the facts as they are presented to us in the roughly hundred depositions given during the preliminary stage in September 1605. The trial was conducted according to the so-called rite of the Council of Ten, a procedure that guaranteed the secrecy of the names and testimony of the witnesses, and prevented the suspect from identifying his accusers. The investigatory phase thus reflected primarily the point of view of the victims and the accusers.¹⁹

The imputations of the victims were directed mainly against Paolo Orgiano, who together with the members of his entourage had over the course of several years created a climate of fear and intimidation in the village. In Vicenza the administration of penal justice was carried out by the Venetian podestà and his assistants, together with a local judiciary body, the Consolato, composed of 12 nobles elected periodically by the city council. The town’s aristocratic elite therefore exercised a strong influence on the administration of penal justice, and this explains why, especially in politically relevant cases, the highest judiciary bodies of the Venetian Republic frequently interfered in local affairs. They would do so by means of appeals or by transferring a proceeding to the tribunal of a different city in the territories (delegazione) or to a tribunal in Venice itself (avocazione).²⁰ Only after several members of the community had been beaten up by Orgiano’s men was the decision made to involve the authorities in Venice, with an accusation that listed all of the injustices that the nobleman had committed. In a summary of the preliminary investigation sent on 29 October 1605, the councillors of Vicenza remarked that Paolo Orgiano continued living

licentiously, surrounded by cruel and brutal companions who acted as his bravi and supported him in his vile misdeeds. He has now reached the age of 30, and although he is a citizen of Vicenza, he spends more of his time in Orgiano, where he has his possessions, than in town. His actions show that he was always haughty by nature, always boasting that he knew how to make himself feared and obeyed by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Manzoni and the Making of Italy
• 1  From History to Fiction
• 2  A Source and Its Archive
• 3  A Conflict of Wills
• 4  Concerning a Capitulary
• 5  From Invention to History
• Afterword: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt?