Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” on Top: The Key to Sicily.

If you want to know about what Sicily was and why it is what it is today, you should read Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece ‘The Leopard.’

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Rachel Donadio: Lampedusa’s ‘The Leopard,’ Fifty Years on: ‘One novel is the key to Sicily: “The Leopard,” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s masterpiece… the decline and fall of the house of Salina, a family of Sicilian aristocrats…. Don Fabrizio, the world-weary, cleareyed Prince of Salina, scion of an old feudal family and lover of astronomy. It opens in 1860 with the landing in Sicily of forces intent on unifying Italy and ends in 1910, when a priest comes to assess the reliquaries of the prince’s now aged spinster daughters. In between, it recounts the fortunes of the prince’s favorite nephew, Tancredi, who supports the unification efforts of Giuseppe Garibaldi more out of opportunism than idealism and eventually becomes a diplomat. Tancredi’s career is made possible only by his marrying money—which inevitably means marrying down. To the horror of his aunt, the devastation of a cousin who loves him and the wry comprehension of his uncle, Tancredi falls in love with Angelica, the beautiful daughter of an upwardly mobile landed peasant father and an illiterate mother…. Tancredi… speaks the novel’s most famous line: “If we want things to stay as they are,” he tells his uncle, “things will have to change.” Tancredi’s declaration lies at the heart of “The Leopard,” at once a loving portrait of a vanished society and a critique of its provincialism…
LINK: <https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/arts/29iht-booktue.1.14826755.html&gt;

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