Novel · A way to begin
The Leopard
Il Gattopardo
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa · 1958
Synopsis
In May 1860, Garibaldi's Red Shirts land in Sicily. Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, sees his class wavering as Italian unity takes shape. His favourite nephew, Tancredi, joins the revolutionaries; at the family estate of Donnafugata, he falls in love with Angelica, daughter of don Calogero Sedàra, an enriched and ambitious bourgeois. The novel follows, through the prince's family, the decline of the aristocracy in the face of the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Context
The manuscript was rejected by Mondadori and by Einaudi, where Elio Vittorini judged it old-fashioned. After the author's death, Giorgio Bassani had it published by Feltrinelli, in Milan, in November 1958. It was the first great bookshop success of postwar Italy, and the book received the Strega Prize in 1959. Fanette Pézard translated it into French at Seuil in 1959, then Jean-Paul Manganaro in 2007; Archibald Colquhoun's English translation, “The Leopard”, dates from 1960.
Who it is for
A sweeping novel, in a rich and sensuous language, that reads without difficulty but contains little action.
Prizes and reception
Luchino Visconti adapted it for the cinema in 1963, with Burt Lancaster, and the film received the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
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