The Leopard

Based on Wikipedia: The Leopard

A Novel That Almost Never Existed

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was sixty years old and had never published a word. He'd spent his life reading—voraciously, obsessively—but writing? That was for other people. Then, in 1954, something snapped.

His cousin Lucio Piccolo, also well into middle age, had just published a book of poetry. Lampedusa accompanied him to a literary conference and watched as his cousin received the attention of Italy's literary establishment. Afterward, he went home and sat down at his desk. His reasoning was brutally simple: "Being mathematically certain that I was no more foolish than Lucio, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel."

That novel was Il Gattopardo—"The Leopard" in English, though a more literal translation would be "The Serval." It would become the best-selling novel in Italian history. But Lampedusa never saw a single copy in print.

The Last Prince Writes About the Last Prince

Lampedusa wasn't just any writer attempting his first novel. He was the last in a line of Sicilian princes stretching back centuries. His family had ruled from crumbling palaces, watched empires rise and fall, and now—in the twentieth century—found themselves reduced to memories and titles that meant nothing to the modern Italian state.

The novel he wrote was about exactly this: the death of a world.

Set during the Risorgimento—the period in the 1860s when Italy unified from a patchwork of kingdoms into a single nation—The Leopard follows Don Fabrizio Corbèra, the Prince of Salina. When Giuseppe Garibaldi's famous "Redshirts" sweep through Sicily with their revolutionary army, Don Fabrizio must watch as everything his family has built over generations dissolves like morning fog.

The prince in the novel was based on Lampedusa's own great-grandfather. But friends who read early drafts noticed something else: "The Prince of Salina bears an awful resemblance to myself," Lampedusa admitted.

Rejection, Death, and Posthumous Triumph

The publishing world was not kind to Lampedusa's manuscript.

In 1956, he sent it to Mondadori, Italy's largest publishing house. They rejected it. He revised, expanded, and tried again. The manuscript found its way to Elio Vittorini, a celebrated modernist writer and editor. Vittorini's verdict was dismissive: the novel was "rather old-fashioned" and "essayish."

This was, in a sense, precisely the point. Lampedusa had written a nineteenth-century novel in the twentieth century—deliberately, defiantly. He wasn't interested in the fragmented narratives and stream-of-consciousness techniques that dominated postwar literature. He wanted to capture a vanished world in all its sensual detail: the taste of elaborate Sicilian dinners, the smell of jasmine in aristocratic gardens, the suffocating heat that warped French roses into grotesque shapes.

In 1957, Lampedusa was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died that July in Rome, still unpublished.

But the manuscript kept traveling. A copy reached Giorgio Bassani, who brought it to the publisher Feltrinelli. In March 1958, Feltrinelli contacted Lampedusa's widow. By November, the book was in stores.

It sold out immediately. Fifty-two printings in less than six months.

In 1959, The Leopard won the Strega Prize, Italy's highest literary honor—awarded posthumously to an author who had never published anything in his lifetime.

The Story Itself

The novel opens in May 1860 with a scene of supreme irony: an aristocratic family kneeling in prayer while revolution thunders toward them.

Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, leads his household through the Rosary. The ritual is ancient, comforting, unchanging. But Garibaldi's Redshirts have already landed on the Sicilian coast. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies—the Bourbon dynasty that has ruled southern Italy for generations—is about to collapse. Sicily will be absorbed into a unified Italy under King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont.

What does this mean for a prince whose family crest features a leopard?

Everything and nothing.

Don Fabrizio is not a man who deludes himself. He sees clearly that his world is ending. His beloved nephew Tancredi, whom he considers his true spiritual heir (unlike his own mediocre son Paolo, whose main interest is horses), joins Garibaldi's revolutionaries. When the prince questions this apparent betrayal of their class, Tancredi delivers the novel's most famous line, a statement so perfectly cynical it has become a political proverb in Italy:

"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

This is the novel's dark heart. The aristocracy will survive—but only by transforming itself, by marrying into the rising middle class, by abandoning its principles while maintaining its pretensions.

The Marriage Plot as Class Warfare

The central drama concerns a marriage negotiation that doubles as a transfer of power between classes.

When the Salina family travels to their country estate at Donnafugata, they encounter Don Calogero Sedara—the local mayor who has grown spectacularly wealthy through business dealings of questionable legality. His fortune now rivals that of the ancient Salina family. More importantly, he has a daughter.

Angelica Sedara is staggeringly beautiful. Lampedusa describes her entrance at a dinner party through the "objectifying eyes of male onlookers"—she is compared to the sumptuous dishes on the table, another form of consumption for the aristocratic appetite.

Tancredi falls for her instantly. This creates a problem: the prince's own daughter, Concetta, has been in love with Tancredi for years. Everyone assumed they would marry.

But Don Fabrizio, clear-eyed as ever, recognizes the inevitable. The Falconeri name—Tancredi's inheritance—is noble but bankrupt. Angelica's dowry is immense. The prince helps arrange the match, even as he knows it will break his daughter's heart.

The negotiation scene is a masterpiece of social comedy. The prince attempts to impress Sedara with references to the ancient grandeur of the Falconeri legacy. But both men know the truth: Sedara's money is real; Tancredi's nobility is not much more than a pleasant story. The bourgeoisie is absorbing the aristocracy through marriage, transforming one form of capital into another.

The Ballroom and the Deathbed

Two scenes form the emotional climax of the novel.

The first is a ball—one of the great set pieces in all of literature. Angelica makes her debut in Palermo society and is a triumphant success. The prince dances with her, and for a moment, vitality surges back into his aging body. But as the evening progresses, his mood darkens. He wanders through gilded rooms, past exhausted dancers and wilting flowers, and sinks into contemplation of his own mortality. The aristocracy around him is already dead; they simply haven't noticed yet.

The second scene, decades later, shows the prince on his deathbed in a shabby hotel room. The magnificence of the palaces and ballrooms has been stripped away. His wife is dead. His son Paolo was trampled by horses. Concetta and her sisters never married—they've hardened into bitter spinsters, their chances at happiness destroyed by that long-ago dinner party.

As he dies, Don Fabrizio understands that he is the last true Prince of Salina. After him, the title will be an empty word. The leopard of the family crest will become a stuffed trophy.

The Controversy

When The Leopard became a sensation, Italian intellectuals didn't know what to make of it.

The political left attacked it as reactionary. Alberto Moravia, one of Italy's most celebrated novelists, complained that the book expressed "ruling-class ideas and view of life." The poet Franco Fortini condemned it as "right-wing." When someone tried to nominate the novel for the Strega Prize, Moravia threatened: "I will never look you in the face again."

But others read the same novel and saw a merciless critique of the aristocracy. Louis Aragon, the French surrealist and committed communist, defended the book passionately. Many Sicilian nobles were scandalized that one of their own would expose their world so ruthlessly.

Both readings have merit. Lampedusa was not writing political propaganda for either side. He was writing an elegy—and elegies are complicated things. You can mourn the death of a world while simultaneously recognizing that it deserved to die.

The novel criticizes the Risorgimento from multiple directions at once. The Piedmontese revolutionaries from northern Italy are portrayed as naive about the South, full of grand plans that will shatter against Sicilian reality. But the old Bourbon regime is represented by figures like Don Fabrizio's brother-in-law Màlvica—a fool clinging to a corpse. The unified Italian state will simply replace one set of exploiters with another, leaving the Sicilian peasants exactly where they started.

What Joyce Dreamed, Lampedusa Abandoned

According to Lampedusa's widow, he originally conceived the novel as a story taking place over the course of a single day in 1860—similar to James Joyce's Ulysses, which compresses all of human experience into one day in Dublin.

Only the first chapter of The Leopard follows this plan. The rest of the novel spans decades, with chapters separated by weeks, months, or years. Lampedusa abandoned the modernist constraint in favor of something more traditional: a family saga, a meditation on time and mortality, a portrait of social transformation.

This is what Vittorini meant when he called the book "old-fashioned." But Lampedusa's old-fashionedness was deliberate. He was writing about the end of an old-fashioned world, in a style appropriate to that world. The form matched the content.

The Final Image

The novel ends in 1910, fifty years after Garibaldi's invasion.

Concetta is now seventy years old, still living in the family estate with two of her sisters. The once-grand manor has shrunk into a museum of relics—both literal religious relics (which the sisters worship devotedly) and metaphorical ones (mementos of past glory that Concetta cannot release).

A church official visits to examine the relics. Most are determined to be forgeries. The family's sacred objects are as fake as their social position.

Angelica arrives for a visit. Through a chance conversation, Concetta learns a devastating truth: Tancredi had intended to propose to her all those years ago. Her entire life—decades of bitterness and isolation—was based on a misunderstanding.

As Angelica drives away, Concetta notices that the Falconeri estate (Tancredi's family home, once neglected and decaying) is now prospering. The families have switched places. Money married nobility, and money won.

Concetta makes a decision. She asks a servant to dispose of the stuffed body of Bendico—Don Fabrizio's beloved Great Dane, preserved through taxidermy for half a century.

The dusty carcass is thrown from a window. For one moment, as it falls, it seems to come alive again.

Then it's gone.

The Film

In 1963, the director Luchino Visconti adapted The Leopard for film. He cast Burt Lancaster—an American actor—as Don Fabrizio. This might seem like an odd choice for a Sicilian prince, but Lancaster's performance is considered one of the greatest in cinema history. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Visconti, himself an aristocrat from an ancient Milanese family, understood the material intimately. He was filming his own world's funeral.

Why It Endures

The Leopard speaks to anyone who has watched an old order die.

The specific setting—1860s Sicily—matters less than the universal pattern. Every generation witnesses transformations that render the previous world obsolete. The skills and values that guaranteed success become irrelevant. The people who mastered the old rules find themselves bewildered by the new game.

Don Fabrizio's great gift—and his great curse—is that he sees this clearly. He doesn't rage against the dying of the light. He doesn't pretend the light isn't dying. He simply watches, with infinite weariness and occasional flashes of dark humor, as everything he knows dissolves.

"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

It's the oldest trick in the book: revolution as preservation, transformation as conservation. The names on the doors change; the doors remain closed to the same people. Tancredi joins the revolutionaries not to overthrow his class but to save it. He succeeds. The nobility survives by becoming something else—by marrying money, by abandoning principle, by keeping the forms while gutting the content.

Lampedusa, the last prince of his line, understood this with perfect clarity. He wrote it down in a novel he never expected to publish. Then he died.

The novel became the best-selling book in Italian history.

If he'd wanted things to stay as they were, things would have had to change.