Title: The Leopard Author: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Creation Date: 1958 Location: Italy Collection: One Book Per Country
Brief
Il Gattopardo was published posthumously by Feltrinelli in Milan in November 1958, over a year after the author's death. It had been rejected by Einaudi — on Elio Vittorini's reader's report — and by Mondadori. Giorgio Bassani read the typescript and insisted Feltrinelli publish it. The novel became the best-selling Italian novel to its date, won the 1959 Strega Prize posthumously, and was made into Luchino Visconti's 1963 film starring Burt Lancaster, which carried it into the international canon.
The novel follows Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, as he watches the aristocratic world he was born to administer being replaced by a bourgeois national state he can neither support nor resist. The main action runs from May 1860, when Garibaldi's Thousand land at Marsala, through the early Kingdom of Italy, to the Prince's death in 1883. Central figures are his nephew Tancredi, who joins the Garibaldini out of self-interest; Angelica Sedàra, daughter of the rising bourgeois mayor; and the plain Concetta, whose unrequited love for Tancredi is one of the novel's quiet wounds.
The book's most famous line — "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change" — has become the defining epigram for Italian political cynicism. It is the line Italians reach for to explain their country. The novel's greatness is that the sentence is not its conclusion but its starting problem, and the pages that follow test it against a dying aristocrat's intelligence, melancholy, and courage.
The Country
The Sicily Lampedusa writes about is the Sicily of a specific collision: Garibaldi's volunteer army arriving in May 1860 on a feudal island not genuinely disturbed since the Norman conquests. The Thousand landed at Marsala on 11 May, defeated a Bourbon force at Calatafimi, and entered Palermo by the 27th. A plebiscite on 21 October 1860 joined Sicily to the Kingdom of Sardinia. On 17 March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed from Turin. What Cavour left behind was an Italy on paper and a Sicily in fact.
The island's social structure — great absentee estates, a barely literate peasantry bound to unchanged sharecropping, a baronage with twelfth-century privileges — was not going to be altered by Piedmontese bureaucrats with tax forms. The new Italian state tried to govern Sicily as though it were Lombardy and ran into what came to be called the questione meridionale: a modernising northern bourgeoisie attempting to administer an agrarian south with almost nothing in common with their own.
Out of this mismatch the Mafia emerged in recognisable modern form during the 1860s and 1870s — baronial power dressed in the language of state contracts. Lampedusa was writing in 1954–57 from inside a Sicilian aristocracy that had spent a century managing its own extinction. He knew the story from the losing side. His Sicily is bleached stone, agave, dust, and heat — a landscape where every conqueror, from Greek to Piedmontese, has been absorbed into the same baked, patient, pessimistic soil.
The Writer
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was born in Palermo on 23 December 1896. The family's decayed estate at Santa Margherita di Belice, in the province of Agrigento, provided the physical model for the fictional Donnafugata. Writing Il Gattopardo was an act of family history and of settling accounts with a world he had grown up in and watched end.
He fought in the First World War, was taken prisoner at Caporetto in 1917, escaped from a Hungarian camp and walked most of the way home. In 1932 he married Alexandra Wolff-Stomersee — "Licy" — a Baltic-German baroness trained as a psychoanalyst under a follower of Freud. They spent long stretches apart, she in Latvia and then Rome, he in Palermo.
For most of his adult life Lampedusa read — European literature in six languages, with the thoroughness of someone who did not need to earn a living from it. He produced almost nothing of his own until close to sixty. The catalyst was a 1954 literary conference where his cousin Lucio Piccolo appeared as a poet. Lampedusa decided he could write the novel about Sicily and the Risorgimento he had been carrying in his head.
He began Il Gattopardo in 1955 and finished a draft in 1956. In early 1957 he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in Rome on 23 July, having seen his manuscript rejected by two publishers without living to see Feltrinelli's acceptance. It is the only novel he wrote, and the only one he needed to.
The Reckoning
The novel's reception was immediately contentious. On its 1958 appearance it was attacked by the Italian communist literary establishment — Vittorini, Alberto Moravia, the critic Antonello Trombadori — as reactionary and hostile to the progressive meaning of the Risorgimento. Its cool, melancholic view of unification cut directly across the heroic Garibaldi narrative both the centrist establishment and the Marxist left had invested in. For several years the official verdict was that the book was beautifully written and politically indefensible.
Luchino Visconti's 1963 film, made by a director who was both a Marxist and a count, honoured rather than critiqued the aristocratic world and made Don Fabrizio a figure of tragic dignity. Its success internationalised the novel. Over the following decades the novel's reputation kept rising. Its political pessimism looked less like nostalgia and more like prophecy, especially after the tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s exposed the post-war political order as the same baronial system under different colours, and made Tancredi's line the operational motto of Italian political life.
It has remained the best-selling Italian novel of all time. Its judgement on the Risorgimento, once dismissed as aristocratic sulking, is now taught in Italian schools as one permissible reading. The novel outlived its early critics because its account of revolutionary impulses absorbed into unchanged structures of power proved more accurate than the heroic version they had wanted to defend.
The Reading
The novel opens on a May afternoon in 1860 at the Villa Salina on the outskirts of Palermo, with the family at the daily recitation of the rosary. Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, is a giant of a man — over six feet, with pale hair, pale skin, and the pale eyes of his German mother — a proud amateur astronomer who keeps a small observatory on the roof of the villa, a serious hunter, and an intellectual stranded among a class of hereditary idiots whose conversation bores him and whose piety embarrasses him. He leads the household through the familiar prayers while his mind moves freely across the subjects that actually interest him: the beauty of the garden, the state of his various estates, the positions of the stars he will observe that night, and above all the news that has reached the city that morning. Garibaldi has landed at Marsala. The Bourbon kingdom is going to fall. His world is about to change in ways he has half-expected for years and is entirely unready for.
His favourite nephew Tancredi Falconeri arrives at the villa to announce, with the charm and calculation that define him, that he is leaving to join the Garibaldini. Tancredi is handsome, penniless, orphaned, and the son of a sister the Prince remembers with complicated affection. He has already understood what his uncle is still reluctantly digesting: that in the new Italy being made by the Risorgimento, the surviving position for a Sicilian nobleman is not on the losing side of the fight but on the right side of the winning argument. "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything must change," he tells Don Fabrizio, in the sentence that has become the novel's signature, and then kisses his uncle's hand and goes. Don Fabrizio lets him go. He is too intelligent to approve of the calculation and too realistic to condemn it, and he discovers that he loves Tancredi with the particular warmth he reserves for people who are honest about what they are.
The family leaves the heat of Palermo for their summer move to the country estate at Donnafugata, an ancient half-ruined palace in the dry interior of the island. The journey across the baked inland landscape — through villages of baked earth under a sky so bright it erases shadows — is rendered as a passage out of one century into another. When the family arrives, the town turns out to receive them in the customary way, with the band playing and the mayor making a speech of welcome, but the mayor is new. Don Calogero Sedàra is the novel's representative of the rising class: a self-made provincial notable, cunning, acquisitive, physically graceless, dressed in an ill-cut evening coat, entirely without the aesthetic refinement Don Fabrizio values, and very obviously on his way to becoming the richest man in the district. Don Fabrizio observes him with a honest dislike that is also an honest recognition. This man, he sees, is more suited to the future than I am.
At dinner on the first night of their stay, Don Calogero brings his daughter Angelica. She enters the candlelit dining room of Donnafugata in a pink dress, black-haired, olive-skinned, tall, with the beauty of a woman who has been told what her face can do and has decided to use it. Tancredi, who has been wounded in the eye during the fighting for Palermo and is convalescing with the family, sees her across the table and is immediately undone. Don Fabrizio sees him see her. The scene is one of the great moments of recognition in the novel, because what the Prince understands in that instant is not only that Tancredi will marry this girl but that the Salina line will be absorbed into the Sedàra fortune, that his favourite nephew is going to save himself and the family by reaching precisely into the class Don Fabrizio cannot bring himself to respect, and that the arrangement is the correct one. Angelica is beautiful enough to have been born an aristocrat, and her father's money will pay for the castles Tancredi does not own.
The negotiation of the marriage falls to the Prince. In one of the novel's most finely observed scenes, Don Calogero comes to Don Fabrizio's study to discuss the match, and the two men conduct a careful dance around the questions of dowry, land, and rank, each aware of exactly what the other needs and of the fiction they are both required to maintain. Don Fabrizio accepts Don Calogero as a relation, and in doing so breaks the heart — quietly, without anyone watching — of his own plain daughter Concetta, the eldest of his children, who had loved Tancredi with the patient devotion of a girl raised to expect nothing for herself and has understood since his arrival at Donnafugata that he would never love her back. Concetta's wound is one of the novel's quietest and deepest. She will carry it into spinsterhood and into the final chapter, fifty years later, where it will still be bleeding.
The plebiscite of October 1860 — the vote by which Sicily was formally joined to the new Italy — is handled with devastating irony. On the day of the count, Don Fabrizio goes down to the town hall of Donnafugata and watches Don Calogero announce the result: yes votes overwhelming, no votes almost non-existent. The Prince knows that there were no votes in the town; he has himself heard men declare their opposition in his own kitchen two nights before. Don Calogero has simply counted the numbers that needed to be there. The Prince recognises, with a tired clarity, that the vote is a performance whose outcome was decided before the ballot papers were printed, and that the new Italian state has been founded on exactly the same kind of pragmatic fiction that the Bourbon state was founded on, administered by exactly the kind of men who had always administered it in Sicily, for exactly the same reasons. The novel does not editorialise. It simply records the count.
Some months later a visitor arrives from Turin: the Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo, a well-meaning Piedmontese functionary sent south by the new government to invite distinguished Sicilian gentlemen to accept nominations to the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy. Chevalley arrives expecting to meet a grand feudal lord and finds instead a sad, intelligent giant who listens to his proposition with grave courtesy and then, in one of the novel's greatest set pieces, declines. Sicily does not want improvement, Don Fabrizio tells him. Sicily wants sleep. Every conqueror who has come to this island over two and a half thousand years has tried to wake it up, and every one has failed, and Sicily has gone on dreaming its long dream of immobility under whatever new flag was nailed to the wall. He himself, he tells Chevalley, is too old and too tired to pretend he believes in a national regeneration he has watched the necessary lies being told about. He recommends Don Calogero Sedàra for the seat instead. Don Calogero, he explains, will know how to handle the new arrangements, because the new arrangements are him.
Chevalley leaves Donnafugata in the dawn, shaken, understanding that he has met something he does not know how to report back to Turin, and the novel shifts upward into its formal peak: the ball at the Palazzo Ponteleone in Palermo. Don Fabrizio, Stella his wife, Tancredi, Angelica, and the rest of the family attend a grand society ball to mark Angelica's formal entry into Palermo society as Tancredi's betrothed. The ball sequence, often extracted as a set piece and filmed almost frame by frame by Visconti, is the novel's formal summit. Don Fabrizio moves through the lit rooms observing the new bourgeoisie who have taken over the aristocratic spaces, the young women who have learned the codes without the substance, the generals of the new army in their new uniforms, the mirrors that show him his own age and bulk and the accumulated evidence that what he was bred to preserve is already gone. He accepts a dance with Angelica in an adjoining room, waltzes with her once around the floor — the last dance, the important one — and the scene becomes simultaneously a moment of physical pleasure in the presence of a young woman's beauty and a meditation on mortality, the body's insistence on beauty against the mind's knowledge of ending. When it is over he walks home through the dawn streets of Palermo alone, past a cart carrying the carcass of a dead bullock, and goes to bed recognising that he has said goodbye to something.
The novel then breaks its time and leaps forward to July 1883. Don Fabrizio, now in his seventies, is returning to Palermo from a medical consultation in Naples and collapses in a hotel room near the railway station. His family gathers around him — Stella, the surviving children, Tancredi now a middle-aged diplomat, Concetta still unmarried. The Prince lies in the narrow hotel bed as his body fails and tries to take stock of his life, counting up the hours of genuine happiness he has known and finding that they add up to only a few weeks in a life of nearly seventy years. At the end a beautiful young woman comes to the side of his bed — the figure he has seen before in the skies of his own observatory, the woman who is also the star Venus, the sum of all the women he has loved, and the personification of his death. She has come to take him. The Prince recognises her with a quiet gratitude and goes with her. It is one of the great death scenes in European literature, and its greatness lies in the way it refuses both protest and sentimentality: Don Fabrizio has lived for thirty years with the knowledge of his world's ending and has managed that knowledge with more grace and more honesty than anyone around him, and in the final moment he meets what is coming the way he has met everything else, with curiosity and courtesy.
The epilogue is set in 1910, twenty-seven years after the Prince's death. His three surviving daughters — Concetta, Carolina, and Caterina — are living in reduced circumstances in the family palace in Palermo, three elderly spinsters in a house of memories. The novel notes that Concetta is now the unquestioned head of what remains of the household, that Carolina has grown increasingly devout and increasingly eccentric, and that Caterina is partly bedridden. Tancredi is years dead. Angelica, now a widowed and very grand old woman, still visits occasionally and brings with her the faint unwelcome air of a world that has moved on without the Salinas. The immediate occasion of the final chapter is the arrival of a cardinal's delegation come to inspect the family's private chapel, whose relics — the bones of obscure martyrs and saints the Salinas have venerated for generations — have been examined by diocesan authorities and found, for the most part, to be inauthentic. The delegation, polite and embarrassed, supervises the removal of the false relics one by one from their reliquaries under the quiet supervision of the three sisters. The chapel is left almost empty. The sisters watch their father's sacred objects being taken away and recognise that one more layer of the world they were born to is dissolving in front of them, and that there is nothing to be done about it except to acquiesce with whatever dignity they can manage. Concetta, still carrying the wound Tancredi inflicted fifty years earlier and now carrying also the wound of having outlived everyone she loved, goes up to her room afterwards. In a small act of private housekeeping that is also an act of grief and of release, she orders a servant to throw out the stuffed body of her father's long-dead hunting dog Bendicò, which has been standing in a cupboard in the corner of her room for decades gathering dust. The servant obeys, carries the dog to a window, and tosses it into the courtyard below. In the last paragraph of the novel Bendicò sails through the air in a brief ungainly leap, his stuffed legs flapping, a small cloud of dust rising around him, and then he lands in the dirt of the courtyard and is still. That leap — the novel's last image — is Lampedusa's final comment on the aristocratic world he has been mourning: a beloved, dusty, stuffed animal making one last motion in the air before it hits the ground, and everything that had gone with the Prince going with it.
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Archibald Colquhoun's English translation, first published in 1960 and revised for later editions, remains the standard. The 2007 Pantheon paperback includes a foreword by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi — the author's adopted son — and restores passages Lampedusa added in the last year of his life. An earlier Pantheon paperback from 1991 carries the same Colquhoun text in a leaner edition.
Translated by Archibald Colquhoun, with a foreword by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi. The current standard edition.
Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. The earlier Pantheon paperback, still widely available.
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