He had rejected the idea of forging a hybrid national language, combining elements from all the regional dialects, in favor of a standard based on the literature and modern speech of a single region, Tuscany. He was a pioneer in combining fiction and documents. Manzoni had created the modern language as well as the country’s greatest novel, I promessi sposi ( The Betrothed). Regardless of the topic, however, many of the discussions came to center on a writer who had died one hundred and fifty years earlier: Alessandro Manzoni. Each panel was supposed to address a broad theme: destinies, combat with reality, and the definition of “Italianness” were a few. In June of last year, a group of about twenty prominent Italian writers gathered in New York for a series of panel discussions over the course of three days.
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