All along the way he was assailed by mendicants, -mendicants of necessity, not of choice -peasants, mountaineers, tradesmen, whole families reduced to poverty, and to the necessity of begging their bread. 1 Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827) recounts the triumph of love above all odds. Set in early seventeenth-century Spanish-Habsburg Lombardy, the tale follows the humble silk-weaver Renzo and the pious villager Lucia in their quest to be rightfully married against the vicissitudes of injustice and circumstance. Beneath its romance, however, it is ultimately a story of deprivation and hardship. Along their journeys, the couple witness the devastation of famine, plague, war and corruption across Lombardy. Poverty abounds. 'Swarms' of families -'mendicants of necessity' -flock to the cities, ragged, wretched and emaciated, in the hopes of finding bread. But their condition is inescapable. The poor have little option but to hope that their faith and suffering will be rewarded in the afterlife.The story served to critique Manzoni's contemporary Lombardy. Fervently condemning feudal privileges, the oppression of the poor, corruption, the introspection of the political class, foreign domination and authoritarian rule, Manzoni desired to bring the forgotten millions -the 'gente di nessuno' -into the limelight. But, although a work of historical fiction, and one heavily imbued with Manzoni's Christian beliefs, I promessi sposi nonetheless captured many of the social realities of its protagonists. Since the sixteenth century, the Italian states had faced widespread economic decline. The inability to keep up with English, Dutch and French competition in manufacturing, the shift in trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and the conquest of much of the peninsula by the Spanish Habsburgs all contributed to a dramatic increase in poverty across the peninsula. 2 In Lombardy, the Thirty Years War, the plague of 1630 and famine and scarcity caused by poor harvests and woeful economic planning -all captured by Manzoni -resulted in vast numbers