Reading The Betrothed in Beijing

Leggo Manzoni/Wo-Dú Manzoni. Reading The Betrothed in Beijing is a project dedicated to creating an open and collaborative digital edition of The Betrothed, alongside a parallel Chinese translation. Led by the scientific coordinators, Professors Paola Italia and Mo Cheng, the initiative brings together students from the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna and the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University.

The project aims to make the novel more accessible through a digital edition enriched with contextual insights and to promote Italian literature in China. It also experiments with a peer-to-peer, lab-based teaching model, where students will collaborate on XML/TEI encoding to publish the translated text online.

Professor Italia will present the project in March at Peking University and at the Italian Cultural Institute in China. She will be joined by Roberta Priore, a research fellow at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna, Mariia Levchenko, a Russian master’s student in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge, and Lorenzo Sabatino, a PhD student in Cultural Heritage.

Mariia, who will contribute her programming expertise to help automate the workflow, shared her perspective: “What made me fall in love with The Betrothed was Manzoni’s style and irony in the original text. While working on the translations, I realised how easily these elements can be lost. For example, the 1854 Russian translation omitted some ironic passages about authority and military power. It became clear to me how cultural and political contexts can influence literary interpretation. That’s why our collaboration with Peking University is so exciting — I look forward to seeing how Chinese readers engage with Manzoni’s themes of justice, faith, love, and human resilience, which I believe transcend cultural boundaries.”

Lorenzo added: “I joined the project to experience first-hand how a literary classic can connect cultures across time and space, serve as a tool of identity recognition, and facilitate the integration of diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches. I expect to work in an innovative environment that fosters idea exchange and mutual, horizontal learning, expanding my research experience in digital humanities by amplifying multiple voices and perspectives on cultural heritage.”

“Leggo Manzoni/Wo-Dú Manzoni. Reading The Betrothed in Beijing” builds on “Adopt a Commentary on The Betrothed” a project organised by Professor Italia together with researchers Beatrice Nava and Ersilia Russo as part of a PCTO (Paths for Transversal Skills and Orientation). This initiative involved 500 students and 30 high school teachers from across Italy and it led to the creation of Leggo Manzoni, a platform that offers free access to 40 commentaries on the 1840 edition of the novel. It also features the sections Traduco Manzoni, with 15 translations in different languages, and Vedo Manzoni, an interactive space where users can browse through the novel’s illustrations — originally designed and commissioned by Manzoni himself.

In the past semester alone, over 1,700 people worldwide have read the commentaries and translations available on the platform.