In the fourth year of high school the Italian teacher already enters with the air of someone who has to move in a Panda. There is the program, there are the authors, there are the tests, there is Dante who has no intention of getting out of the way, there are Leopardi, Foscolo, Romanticism, the questions to fit between assemblies, trips, orientation, anxiety from premature maturity and students who have the face of those who slept the night before with TikTok turned on on their pillow. In the midst of all this someone thinks of putting The betrothed there, in the fourth year, as if changing the shelf of a book was enough to save it.
On paper it seems like an adjustment, but in Italian schools it risks becoming a burial complete with ministerial stamp. The draft of the new national indications for high schools provides for the possibility of replacing Manzoni’s novel in the second year of the two-year period with texts considered more accessible, postponing its reading to the fourth year, even if only in extracts, within the path on the Manzonian age. Minister Giuseppe Valditara specified that this is a proposal from the commission, still in a comparison phase, and that the new indications will be adopted only after the listening process. The game, therefore, is still open. Well. Because this time discussing is really necessary.
A special place in the two-year period
From here a petition was immediately born asking for it to be held The betrothed to the two-year period, and starts from a very concrete matter: Manzoni has space during the second year. In fourth grade his hours are numbered. Teachers know it, students know it, anyone who has seen a school program become a lung-busting race knows it. Alessandro Barbero is among the first signatories of the appeal, together with other scholars, to ask that the novel remain where it can be read with breathing, even without transforming it into a mass sung chapter by chapter.
The betrothed in the second year they can be crossed. With effort, of course. With yawns, too. With the teacher who translates Manzoni into the living language, with the class who grumbles at first and then discovers that Don Abbondio resembles half of the adults who say “what can I do”, that Renzo loses his mind like anyone when he ends up in the middle of a crowd, that Lucia is much more uncomfortable than the school holy card in which we put her out of national laziness.
In fourth grade, however, the novel risks ending up in pieces. A page on the humble, one on Providence, one on the plague, one on Don Rodrigo, maybe the nun of Monza because at least there the class wakes up. And here the classic reduced to a card is served. Name, author, context, main themes, two quotes, next one. Something clean, tidy, devastating.
The Current Indications of 2010 place Manzoni in the first two years and define it as a work capable of bringing together artistic quality, the formation of modern Italian, novel form, breadth and variety of themes and perspectives on the world: it makes language, history, imagery, society, power, fear, morality and storytelling work together. Lots of stuff, yes. Precisely for this reason it takes time.
Effort, the good kind
The topic of accessibility must be taken seriously. A class of fifteen year olds today can have very different reading levels. Inside the same classroom there are very strong students, fragile students, kids who have recently arrived in Italy, teenagers who have been reading novels for years and others who stumble after half a page. Manzoni can be difficult. The syntax resists: some passages ask for true, patient, concrete guidance.
A study published in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology followed 236 children between 11 and 13 years old and observed an interesting fact: those who read more fiction showed a greater ability to understand the thoughts, emotions and intentions of others. The authors remain cautious, because the study indicates a link, not definitive proof of cause and effect. But the point remains strong: stories help kids train their gaze on others.
That’s where the school comes in. It’s easy to remove every obstacle: the problem comes later, when students discover that the adult world speaks in long sentences, illegible contracts, complicated articles, university texts, reports, sentences, manuals, instructions, forms, emails written by people who hate humanity. Complex reading is not learned by osmosis. He trains. And a long novel, followed in class, with an adult leading the way, can become a less sad training ground than it seems.
Another qualitative study from 2025, conducted with adolescents aged 15 to 17, collected interviews on the relationship between reading fiction and well-being. The kids talked about emotions, connection with characters, friends, family, reading community, personal growth, empathy, knowledge of others and literacy skills. Here too, no magic wand. Just a fairly concrete confirmation: reading stories can become a way to question yourself without always being there, staring at your navel.
The data also points in that direction. An OECD report reminds us that the habit of reading long texts is decisive for building reading skills: in OECD countries, students who deal with texts of at least 101 pages at school obtain on average 31 PISA points more in reading than those who work on texts of 10 pages or less, taking into account their socio-economic profile and gender. The same passage positively links fiction reading, long texts, and reading outcomes.
And then The betrothed in the two-year period they still have an almost brutal function. They put before a fifteen-year-old the power that threatens, the justice that arrives awry, the crowd that goes crazy, the fear that disguises itself as common sense, the desire to choose one’s own life, violence against women without the need for slogans, the plague with rumors, the invented culprits, the collective panic. After COVID, the plague part sounds different. Less dust, more discomfort. The people looking for spreaders, the confusion between fear and truth, the need to find someone to hate: stuff that we have seen circulating even without carriages and lazarets.
Nobody expects every teenager to fall in love with Manzoni. Maybe he’ll hate it. Maybe he will only save the plague, or the Unnamed, or the bravo scene, or that poor Don Abbondio who made a career out of fear. That’s fine too. The school does not serve to produce fan clubs. It serves to leave traces, tools, antibodies. It helps to make it clear that a difficult page can open if someone teaches you where to put your hands.
The classic treated badly
The greatest risk lies in false kindness. Telling students that Manzoni is too difficult may seem like a caring gesture, but it often becomes a lowering of the ceiling. As if to say “we give you simpler texts because maybe you can get by with these”. A living school should do something else: choose accessible texts when needed, of course, and at the same time keep a door open to what requires more breathing space.
No one in their right mind wants to transform The betrothed in corporal punishment from September to May. You can read better. It can be cut where needed. You can work on paths, characters, narrative nuclei, language, history, conflicts. You can stop using it as a sacred ornament and start treating it for what it is: a novel full of people who are afraid, lie, run away, manipulate, resist, give in, pray, make mistakes, start again. Stuff much closer to teenagers than we make people believe when we explain it badly.
The petition, in this sense, defends Manzoni less than it seems. Defends long reading time. It defends the possibility that a class spends months inside a story and learns to see how the characters change, how a threat grows, how a phrase said with caution can become complicity, how language builds the world. He also defends teachers, those who still manage to let a novel breathe in second grade instead of reducing it to two pages before the test.
Move The betrothed in fourth grade it may seem reasonable. More maturity, more historical context, more literary tools. Then the bell rings, the program gets shorter, absences arrive, two hours skip, a project comes in, a meeting starts, a test is made up. The long novel becomes photocopy material. And this is how you lose a classic: just take away its time. Then the bell will take care of it.
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