Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusas novel is both an escapist joy and a political education

May 2nd 2020

YOU MIGHT think that a nostalgic novel about a declining 19th-century Sicilian aristocrat by an unknown writer would have sunk without trace. Yet Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusas The Leopard, first published in 1958 shortly after his death, became a classic. One reason is that it is an extraordinarily evocative piece of writing. Another is that it distils timeless truths about revolutions and the rise and fall of elites.

Wherever you might be locked down, The Leopard will transport you to western Sicily, a lovely, faithless land of sun and dust, of carnal delights and golden crops, of lush gardens and barren mountains, of crumbling palaces and Ozymandian monuments to an ancient past of multiple invasions. Its people are sunk in a voluptuous torpor, their vanity stronger than their misery, full of secrets nobody keeps.

The protagonist, Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is based on Lampedusas great-grandfather. He is a conservative, attached to feudal order, but self-aware. His world is challenged in 1860 by Garibaldis invasion of the island. At night, on the hills around Palermo, glimmer the flickering lights of dozens of bonfires lit by the rebel band, silent threats to the city of palaces and convents (in Archibald Colquhouns translation). Garibaldis overthrow of the moth-eaten Bourbon kingdom of Naples and Sicily was the prelude to the unification of Italy.

Although he has several children, Fabrizio sees his true heir in Tancredi, his zestful nephew who prepares to join Garibaldi. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change, Tancredi explains. That sentiment has entered the political vocabulary of the Latin world as gattopardismo (a play on the novels Italian title, Il Gattopardo), a philosophy of embracing change to neuter or at least control it.

Change is personified by Don Calogero, the shrewd mayor of Donnafugata, an inland town and location of Fabrizios favourite palace. Crushing the amorous hopes of his own daughter, Concetta, Fabrizio spies the advantage to Tancredis career of marrying him to the mayors only child, the beautiful Angelica. This involves Fabrizio welcoming into his family the little conglomeration of ill-cut clothes, money and cunning brashness that is Calogero.

The victors of revolutions often ape the rulers they dislodge. That is especially so in the Latin world, where many have been rearrangements of the furniture rather than genuine upheavals. Lampedusa was not alone in believing that unification had taken Sicily backwards (one form of resistance would be the Mafia). At first, the Italian left decried The Leopard; it took Luchino Visconti, a communist but an aristocratic one, to recognise the books genius, turning it into a baroque film starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and a young Claudia Cardinale. That multinational cast was a fitting tribute to a story rooted in time and place that also transcends them.

This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "Rereading The Leopard"

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Travel to a land of sun and dust with The Leopard - The Economist