Vanina Vanini

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Vanina Vanini is the title of a story by Stendhal (1783-1842), the nom de plume of Marie-Henri Beyle.

Set in 1840s in the Risorgimento of Italy when the country was under the Austrian control. Vanina Vanini, the daughter of a Roman aristocrat, falls in love with the wounded Pietro Missirilli, a member of the revolutionary Carbonari organized in the fashion of Freemasonry, who is hidden in the residence of her father, Don Asdrubale Vanini, and nurses him back to health, and follows him to northern Italy. Vanina is obsessed with the charisma of Pietro and is determined to free him from his revolutionary commitment so that he can devote himself entirely to her. The irony is that, in order to do so, she opts to betray his revolutionary activities to the authority. She reveals to him what she did when she visits the now jailed Pietro, which outrages him so much that he attempts to kill her. Pietro is executed and Vanina resumes her decadent aristocratic life after the Quixotic episode. This romantic tragedy is a battle between the vanity of Vanina, a beautiful woman with whom many rich Romans are in love (of whom is Livio Savelli, her future husband), who is desperately in love with a surgeon's son, a Carbonaro, who loves her, and his devotion to his country. With her pride wounded after her lover calls him a monster, she does the only respectable thing that she can do; marry the man who is madly in love with her but whom she scorns: Livio.

Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) adapted this story to a film of the same title in 1961 starring Sandra Milo (Vanina) and Laurent Terzieff (Pietro) -see Vanina Vanini (film).