The VEDO MANZONI project proposes a journey through the illustrations that Manzoni intended to accompany the reading of the final version of the novel.
The illustrations can be explored:
Manzoni entrusted Francesco Gonin and his engravers with an ambitious iconographic project that transformed I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) into the first illustrated novel in Italian literature. From a copy of the Quarantana, which can be browsed in its entirety in the Digital Library of the University of Bologna's Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies the 505 illustrations have been catalogued, described and ascribed metadata. They can be viewed, chapter by chapter, through different search keys: the characters (from Don Abbondio to Sarto), the places (from Renzo and Lucia's village to Giangiacomo Mora's house), the themes (41 keywords, from Love to Violence), as well as the illustrators and engravers of the cartoons. Reading the novel thus becomes a new visual experience, as Manzoni had planned it, considerably anticipating the forms of iconographic narration characteristic of modernity.