Il Gattopardo
A friend decided to celebrate her 40th birthday by renting a fantastic villa in Sicily in the shadow of Mount Etna. It was the perfect setting to read The Leopard, a novel about the waning days of Sicilian aristocracy.
The novel is set mostly during the Risorgimento period of Italian unification during the 1860s, and looks at the aristocratic Salina family, headed by the stoic Prince Fabrizio. With Italian unification and the end of the Kingdom of Sicily and Naples in sight, Don Fabrizio knows change is coming. His old ways and proud traditions set to be consigned to the past, yet the Prince must seek to secure the future for his nephew and heir, Tancredi, if there is to be any chance of saving some part of the dynasty. "For everything to stay the same, everything must change" says Tancredi famously. The Prince recognises the truth in this as the novel's events unfold.
The author, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, was actually the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily. While the novel is based on the life of his great-grandfather, another Prince of Lampedusa, the novel is a mirror to his own life and the changing times he in which he lived in the early twentieth century. After the Lampedusa Palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, di Lampedusa sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it.
Di Lampedusa had a lengthy, unsuccessful struggle to find a publisher, being told by one Italian editor that "his novel is unpublishable". In the year following his death, di Lampedusa's nephew found a publisher, and Il Gattopardo went on to become the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature.
Translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun.
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