A journal of the plague years

A little historical rhyming

Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi) is widely considered the great Italian novel of the 19th century, Italy’s counterpart to Les Miserables, which Victor Hugo wrote in roughly the same period. My Italian friends remember reading it in high school; none have revisited it. A great book may be one that people read once because they have t…