The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni

I've been reading a 19th century Italian novel: The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni. It's quite long, but apparently that doesn't matter to me anymore. When I saw it was around 300k words, I was like, "Only that?" I guess Anthony Trollope has made me used to 400 or even 500k novels.

The book is about two lovers in the 1620s, Renzo and Lucia, who want to…