ONE SIDE-EFFECT of the coronavirus pandemic has been a fresh wave of interest in literary plagues. Sales of Albert Camus’s novel, “La Peste”, in which a doctor’s resistance to an epidemic in Algeria invites all manner of political and philosophical readings, have surged; the same goes for other tales of mass calamity. Less often noticed, at least in the English-speaking world, is a classic fictional account of the progress of a plague through Lombardy—the initial European focus of the current woes.

Alessandro Manzoni first published “The Betrothed” (“I promessi sposi”) in 1827, then revised it in 1840. Set in Spanish-governed northern Italy in the early 17th century, the novel traces the fate of ordinary people governed by vicious, unaccountable overlords. As he follows the adventures of a couple, Renzo and Lucia, Manzoni often pauses to notice the ways that bad rule makes the natural perils that assail humankind infinitely worse. This civic-minded strain—one of the qualities that made the author such a hero to the Italian revolutionaries of the Risorgimento—reaches its apogee in some barnstorming late chapters. They depict the bubonic plague outbreaks of 1630 that swept across northern Italy to kill (so modern calculations reckon) roughly half the population of cities such as Milan, Verona and Venice.

Drawing on contemporary chronicles, Manzoni concentrates on Milan. “The Betrothed” evokes the terror, panic and confusion of a city where (in Archibald Colquhoun’s translation) “the virulence of the disaster brutalised men’s minds” and the sole fever hospital—the lazaretto—holds up to 16,000 suffering, neglected patients. It delivers a masterclass in the psychological stages of an epidemic, from denial and scapegoating to displacement and, finally, belated recognition of the risks and the panic-driven public reactions to them.

Invading German troops had probably hastened the movement of the virus in Lombardy, and at first they bear the brunt of blame. After some early cases, the few doctors who warn of the coming storm meet derision or apathy, with “most of the physicians joined with the people in laughing at the unhappy presages and threatening opinions of the smaller number of their brethren”. Milan’s dysfunctional Tribunal of Health—a threadbare bureaucracy designed for colonial control, not public welfare—ignores or actively conceals evidence. Crackpot conspiracy theories do the rounds as the scale of infection becomes impossible to overlook. It’s all the fault, if not of foreign soldiers, then of witches, or shadowy “poisoners”. When reality bites, blame the outsiders, or else the evil super-spreaders.