He was the author of probably the most loved and admired novel ever written in Italian, but when Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, died in 1957 at 60, he thought his life as a writer had ended in failure.
His only completed novel, Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), had been rejected by two publishing houses. In Places of My Infancy, his never-completed memoir, Lampedusa addresses the reader “who won’t exist”; he believed his words were doomed to remain unread forever.
Just over a year after his death, another publisher stepped in and brought out his novel. During the next six months, The Leopard was reprinted 52 times. In 1959, it won the Strega Prize – Italy’s top literary award. Louis Aragon hailed it as “one of the great books of the century, one of the great books of always”. E M Forster wrote that “reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive”. In 1963, Luchino Visconti, another scion of the Italian nobility (whose forebears had governed Milan in the 15th century), turned the novel into a magnificent, Palme d’Or-winning film, starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale.
Now, more than 60 years later, The Leopard is to have a new life as a Netflix drama. Judging by the first two episodes, although the series honors the original both aesthetically (in its gorgeous Sicilian locations) and in the subtlety of the characterization, it is more explicit than the novel about the political context, a sop to those viewers who don’t know much about 19th-century Italian history. Released at a time when long-established political structures are being dismantled, Lampedusa’s eloquent story has lost none of its relevance.
The author was a prince, but he was not the Prince, the physically splendid specimen at the centre of his novel. Based loosely on Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, the fictional Prince of Salina is in possession of palaces so immense, “he used to say that a house of which one knew every room wasn’t worth living in”. Priests defer to him, obsequious sentries wave his carriage past roadblocks. When he arrives at his country estate, a band plays and the whole town turns out to cheer.
But it is 1860. There is an uprising in Palermo, first twinge of the Risorgimento, the Italian nationalist revolution. Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers land in Sicily, drive out the troops of the Bourbon monarchy, then stream northwards to make a new, united and democratic Italy.
In the novel, these momentous events are offstage rumblings, but occasionally they impinge on the enclosed world of the Salina family. A sickening smell in the garden turns out to emanate from the corpse of a soldier. Worse, the Prince’s beloved nephew Tancredi is marrying (for lust and money) a girl whose nouveau-riche father doesn’t know which kind of boots to wear with a tailcoat, and whose grandfather was a peasant so uncouth, he was known as Papa Merda (a nickname best left untranslated).
Lampedusa was born in 1896, nearly 40 years after the novel’s main action, into a world drastically changed. In his memoir, he recalls exploring his family’s immense homes, and feeling, as a small boy, that he was their “absolute master”. By the time he was writing in 1955, the homes were gone.
The palace in Palermo was wrecked by Allied bombs in 1945. (Lampedusa is said to have escaped on a bicycle, carrying his wife’s furs and a painting by Bellini on his handlebars.) A villa by the sea was also bombed to rubble. The Villa Lampedusa, outside Palermo, was sold and became a nightclub. His mother’s family’s great house with 110 rooms, the model for the dreamily beautiful Donnafugata of the novel, was sold by his uncle in 1924 to pay debts, and subsequently used as a location for Visconti’s film, but later wrecked by an earthquake. As with buildings, so with political institutions. The old order –almost unchanged in Sicily since the Middle Ages – had gone, replaced by the humdrum complexities of modern bureaucracy.
In The Leopard, the Prince is invited to join the senate of the newly united Italy. What is a senate, he asks himself, “an assembly of profiteers with big salaries”, or, at best, “a committee of civil administrators”? Why should he wish to join such a body? “Low work for a Salina!”
Dispossessed and marginalized by history, like his imagined Prince, Lampedusa withdrew into a world of books. David Gilmour, the author of a fine biography, tells how Lampedusa’s life was dominated by two forceful women – his mother, with whom he traveled widely in the 1920s, and his wife, Licy, a Freudian psychoanalyst. They met in London and fell in love over the course of a long walk, during which they talked non-stop about Shakespeare. Licy recalled after his death that their happiest evenings were spent reading aloud to each other in Russian, French, German and Spanish and – especially – English.
Lampedusa entered middle age in the post-war years, and his social life and daily routine were as bookish as his marriage. Every day, this lyrical celebrator of a lost domain of frescoed drawing rooms and formal gardens sparkling with fountains went out into the sad streets of bomb-blasted Palermo. His English translator describes him as “a portly figure holding a bulky briefcase”, following the same routine for years. First, to breakfast at a pasticceria, where he bought cakes and stowed them in that briefcase. Then, to a bookshop for more purchases and on to a new café beneath a skyscraper, where he spent the rest of the day eating his cakes and reading. Every month or so, he would spend a few days with his cousins, the Piccolo brothers, all almost as erudite as he was, in their villa by the sea.
In 1954, Lucio Piccolo was awarded a prize for his poetry. Lampedusa went with him to the mainland for the ceremony. The trip unlocked something. Shortly afterwards, he began to write – at last – The Leopard.
The novel was loved as soon as it was published, but it took longer for it to win the respect of the literati. Italy’s intellectual life in the 1950s was dominated by Left-leaning voices advocating modernism. Alberto Moravia called Lampedusa’s book a “success for the Right”. Other critics sneered at his “reactionary philosophy”. They were blinded by the novel’s voluptuous celebrations of sensuality in all its forms. Here, for example, is a dish of pasta whose description is unparalleled as sexual metaphor: “The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon exuded were but preludes to the delights from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice-laden haze, then chicken livers, hard boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede… the food seemed so delicious because sensuality was circulating in the house.” As with pasta, so with the feel of a smooth silk cravat against a neck, or the languor of long, hot afternoons in the shaded rooms, hung with silk damask faded to silvery iridescence, of a semi-abandoned palace.
Attentive readers soon saw the darkness behind the novel’s surface glitter and the boldness of its structure. It has the amplitude of a great 19th-century novel, but its episodic narrative, its shifting viewpoints and all-pervasive irony mark it as a work of late modernism. Far from being an exercise in nostalgia, the book is a study of decadence. Even the Prince is aware that his grandeur is as hollow as rococo furniture eaten out by woodworm. He watches “the ruin of his class without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it”. The Leopard’s dominant theme is not a lament for an obsolete way of life. Rather, it is a plangent meditation on mortality.
The novel’s ball scene was filmed by Visconti in a celebrated single shot, which passes through a marble hall, up a grand staircase, past flocks of young women, their crinolines spreading over damask upholstery, into the gilded ballroom where dancers twirl beneath chandeliers, past elder gentlemen talking politics in the library, into the chamber where a pair of lovers have found privacy, and on to the supper room where exhausted chaperones fall upon luscious cakes.
Visconti was following Lampedusa, who describes the ball in the literary equivalent of a tracking shot, from the Prince’s point of view. For readers, the scene is filtered through the character’s world-weariness, his detachment from the milieu he once dominated, but which now seems to him to be inhabited by inbred, self-important has-beens. It smells of corruption. It leaves him longing for the cold clarity that he, an amateur astronomer, finds in contemplating the stars.
Beautiful, elegiac, but also keen-eyed and sharply critical, The Leopard belongs to a small but distinguished literary genre. Its companions include The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel chronicling the decline of the Austrian empire to 1914, and Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, also written in the 1930s and combining an evocation of the aristocratic culture of pre-First World War Hungary with an indictment of the frivolity of the ruling class.
The collapse of empires is a theme as old as the fall of Nineveh in 612 BC, but in The Leopard, Lampedusa gives it an entrancing melancholy that transcends the socio-political. In hovels and in palaces alike, all things must pass. All things, except perhaps great literature.
The Leopard is available to stream now on Netflix
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a British cultural historian, novelist, and biographer
