| Description : Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) was an Italian poet and writer
who contributed significantly to the development of the modern, unified Italian language. Both Italy and the Vatican City
are dedicating a €2 commemorative coin to the 150th anniversary of his death. After his education in church
boarding schools, Manzoni moved to Paris in 1805 and found many friends there, especially among the Voltaire followers,
including the philologist Claude Fauriel, who introduced him to the works of William Shakespeare and German Romanticism.
In 1819 Manzoni published his first tragedy Il Conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola), which broke all
classical conventions on the unity of place and time and was sharply criticised by representatives of linguistic purism,
whereupon Goethe defended it. The death of Napoleon Bonaparte on the 5th of May 1821 inspired Manzoni to write
his ode Il cinque Maggio (The Fifth of May), which is one of the best‐known poems in Italian and was first
translated into German by Goethe. His main work, the historical novel I Promessi Sposi (The Bride and Groom), is set
in the years 1628‐1630 in the Duchy of Milan, which was then ruled by Spain, and in neighbouring Bergamo, which
belonged to the Republic of Venice. With its patriotic message, the work is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento
(Resurgence), the striving for a nation‐state of Italy. First published in 1827, Manzoni revised the novel in the
1830s to purge it of remnants of Lombard dialect and present it in Tuscan script so that it could be read by all Italians
throughout the country. It is one of the few works of Italian Romanticism. The coin designer Antonio Vecchio took
the image of Manzoni on the Italian 100,000 lira banknote issued between 1967 and 1979 as a model and to the left of
it, under the country abbreviation, the ligature "RI" (Repubblica Italiana, Italian Republic), he depicted the year of
Manzoni's death and the year of issue with "1873 ‐ 2023" and in the shape of a circle the occasion of issue
"ALESSANDRO MANZONI". On the right is the "R" the mint mark of the Italian mint Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello
Stato in Rome and the designer's signet "AV". |
