MANZONI, Alessandro; VERRI, Pietro. I promessi sposi, storia milanese del secolo XVII. Storia della colonna infame inedita. Sulla tortura e singolarmente sugli effetti che produsse all'occasione delle Unzioni malefiche, alle quali si attribuì la Pestilenza che devastò Milano nel 1630. Osservazioni ripubblicate per far seguito alla Storia della Colonna Infame, descritta dal signor Alessandro Manzoni.

Octavo (262 x 177mm.), 864, 64 pages, with more than three hundred illustrations in the text mostly by Francesco Gonin and Paolo Riccardi. Very light marginal foxing on a few pages, overall a very fine copy in contemporary green morocco, covers and spine richly decorated in gilt and silver.

The definitive edition of Alessandro Manzoni's masterpiece, the most famous novel in Italian literature, bound with a rare appendix containing Pietro Verri's Osservazioni sulla tortura. Manzoni started working on the novel in 1821 after reading a 1627 Italian edict that specified penalties for any priest who refused to perform a marriage when requested to do so. I Promessi sposi was first published on 15 June 1827 and immediately became a hit in Italy and Europe, with more than 80 reprints. It caught not only the attention of publishers and printers but also the praises of many illustrious writers such as Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, George Eliot and Charles Dickens. This edition, the definitive one, was published following an extensive linguistic and stylistic review. Pietro Verri (1728–1797) was one of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth-century Milan. He wrote extensively on philosophy, economics, history and law. His Osservazioni sulla tortura, written between 1760 and 1777, reconstructs the trial of Guglielmo Piazza and Gian Giacomo Mora. Both men were cruelly tortured and then executed, being wrongly accused of spreading the infection during the Great Plague of Milan of 1629–1631. Verri based his account of the events on the trial documents and used it to argue against torture, which was still in use in the Milanese courts at the time. In 1776, when the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa suggested abolishing torture and reducing the use of the death penalty, the Senate of Milan, and particularly the jurist Gabriele Verri, Pietro's father, reacted negatively to this proposal and defended torture as an effective deterrent against crimes. To avoid antagonising the Senate and his own father, Pietro Verri decided not to publish his Osservazioni, which first appeared in print only several years after the author's death, in 1804. Verri's writing was the main source for Alessandro Manzoni's Storia della colonna infame, an historical appendix the author added to the definitive edition of his novel I promessi sposi, set in early seventeenth-century Milan. While Verri used the story to argue against judicial torture, Manzoni emphasised the judges' moral responsibility for the brutal treatment of innocent men and highlighted the dangers of superstition. A rare edition of the Osservazioni sulla tortura, printed by the Milanese typographer Giovanni Silvestri in 1843, is bound at the end of this volume, immediately following the Storia della colonna infame. As Silvestri mentions in his foreword, he had previously published Verri's writing as part of his successful editorial series, the Biblioteca scelta di opere italiane antiche e moderne. This edition had then sold out, and since Manzoni frequently referenced the Osservazioni sulla tortura in his Storia della colonna infame, Silvestri decided to reprint it as a booklet of the same format as Manzoni's Promessi Sposi.

Catalogo di tutte le opere pubblicate dal tipografo-litografo-calcografo e negoziante di libri e stampe cav. Giovanni Silvestri dal 1799 a tutto agosto 1855 colla biografia e ritratto del suddetto. Milano, ditta Giovanni Silvestri, 1856, p. 98; ICCU IT\ICCU\MIL\0307820