"A gift to humanity" - Giuseppe Verde.
Manzoni\'s The Betrothed is indeed "The Great Italian Novel." It is the story of the love and enforced separation of a young peasant boy and girl in northern Italy, during the seventeenth century plague, in a world of foreign domination,. "The Great Italian Novel" - The Wall Street Journal. "The book\'s real greatness lies in its delineation of character " -- The Penguin Companion to European Literature. "A gift to humanity" - Giuseppe Verde