Dal “Fermo e Lucia” alla Seconda minuta: passaggi correttori tra frase e testo

The Betrothed has been the target of early linguistic surveys (dating back to 1842, just after the publication of the final edition), mainly aimed to compare the first and the second edition, and concentrating on what Manzoni himself would call «parole e frasi», that is words and expressions. An angle that continued to be privileged even after the first and the second draft (Prima minuta or Fermo e Lucia and Seconda minuta) became available. The idea behind such a narrowed approach was that Manzoni’s efforts were mainly directed to the vocabulary, and that the architecture of sentences remained almost unchanged from the 1827 to the 1840 edition. It is the aim of this paper to show that such a conclusion will change if: 1) the comparison does not focus on the two published editions, but on the first draft (Prima minuta) and the working manuscript that led to the Ventisettana (Seconda minuta); 2) the area taken into consideration is not the sentence, but the text, that is to say textual fragments which show unity of meaning. Thanks to this new perspective and through the close reading of examples from the story of the Nun of Monza, the paper shows that a syntactic organization based on the principles of before and after, cause and effect was not an issue in the first draft, but it was reached only in the Seconda minuta. Thus, the well known rational, limpid, consequential structure of Manzoni’s prose is not a starting point, but the result of a complex act of re-writing.