In The Betrothed, the great Goethe immediately recognized an example of the Weltliteratur he hoped for. Two hundred years after the conclusion of the first draft of the novel, one hundred and fifty years after the death of its author, scholars from ten countries and three continents are measuring the persistence of the lesson of a writer who wanted, from the very beginning, to be Milanese and European; and who, precisely the essays collected here show us, was capable of being accepted in cultural systems even very distant from his own. In their acceptance, as in their refusal, the different cultures represented here have always seen in Manzoni's works a term of comparison in the most difficult and painful turning points of their political and civil history. This is proven by the renewed success, after the pandemic, of the chapters on the plague and of the Story of the Infamous Column, a work of which a Japanese translation will soon be released. The essays published here will provide ideas and stimuli to further continue the research on a writer whose reasons for topicality remain unchanged and at the same time are renewed with the changing times.