The Leopard Novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: Summary

A novel about the end of a world

The Leopard tells of the Sicily that, between 1860 and the first decade of the twentieth century, moves from the Bourbon kingdom to a unified Italy, seen through the eyes of a man who belongs to that transition but no longer takes part in it: Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. The Treccani Dizionario Biografico describes Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s construction of the novel as an exquisitely modern narrative device, built from the montage of largely self-contained parts that, chapter by chapter, mark the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy.

It is not a historical novel in the strict sense, nor an autobiography: the author drew on episodes from his own family, in particular the life of his great-grandfather, Prince Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi. It is an acknowledged inspiration, not a point-by-point account of real events.

The plot

In 1860 the landing of the Expedition of the Thousand at Marsala opens the season in Sicily that will lead to the island’s annexation to the new Kingdom of Italy, the event covered in the Recap on Italian unification. Prince Fabrizio of Salina watches that historic shift with a clear-eyed detachment: he understands that the aristocracy he belongs to is losing power, and that nothing will bring it back.

The change under way is embodied above all by the prince’s nephew, Tancredi Falconeri: young and ambitious, he chooses to side with the new political order rather than defend the world he grew up in. The clearest sign of that choice is his marriage to Angelica, daughter of Don Calogero Sedara, a commoner who made his own fortune and stands for the new ruling class on the rise. The wedding joins the Salinas’ old name to the Sedaras’ new money, and marks, more than any political speech, the real shift of power from one social class to another. The Prince of Salina watches this happen without openly resisting, almost with resignation: he understands that his own historical role has run its course, and that the future belongs to those, like Tancredi, who know how to adapt.

Gattopardismo, from Tancredi’s line to a concept

It is Tancredi himself, in the novel, who speaks the book’s most famous line, addressed to his uncle:

Tancredi tells his uncle that unless their own side gets involved in the change under way, the new republic will be built without them regardless, and that the only way to keep things as they are is to change first. From that argument comes the term “gattopardismo,” which has travelled well beyond literature: it describes going along with visible, even apparently radical change, precisely in order to keep, underneath, the existing balance of power intact. It is not a refusal of change but its apparent opposite: something changes so that everything else can stay as it is.

Practical example: when a company or an institution announces a sweeping reform but, some time later, the people in charge and the way they hold power are unchanged, commentators often call it “gattopardismo” — a direct reference to Tancredi’s line in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel.

A novel rejected twice

The road to publication was not straightforward. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa submitted the manuscript to Mondadori in May 1956, and the publisher rejected it. He then tried Einaudi, where the novel met a second rejection, this time on the unfavorable judgment of Elio Vittorini, who called it “a decent but conventional piece of work.”

The author died in Rome in 1957; the novel was still unpublished, and he never had the chance to give it a final polish. The Leopard appeared posthumously on 11 November 1958 through Feltrinelli, edited by Giorgio Bassani, the writer who worked on the manuscript after the other publishers had turned it down.

It is not an isolated case in literature: writers tied to a rather different narrative world, such as Giovanni Verga before him, had also written about Sicily from the inside, with a critical eye on its social changes; twentieth-century Sicily would later find another major voice in Luigi Pirandello, even if his language and sensibility were very different from Tomasi di Lampedusa’s.

A success that came after the author’s death

Once it came, success arrived fast. In 1959 The Leopard won the Strega Prize, becoming Italy’s first bestseller with more than 100,000 copies sold: print runs reached 250,000 copies within eight months of publication. A novel rejected by two publishers in under three years became the best-selling Italian book of its time, read by an audience far wider than the one that usually picks up a novel set in nineteenth-century Sicily.

Visconti’s film

In 1963 the director Luchino Visconti made the film adaptation of the novel, bringing a landmark literary text to the screen, much as other directors had already done with other classics, as with Pasolini’s Decameron a few years later. In the cast, Burt Lancaster played Prince Fabrizio of Salina, Claudia Cardinale played Angelica Sedara and Alain Delon played Tancredi Falconeri. The film won the Palme d’Or.

From a manuscript rejected twice to an award-winning film just five years after the novel’s first publication, The Leopard has crossed Italian culture in different forms, while staying tied to the same question the Prince of Salina asks himself as he faces a world that is changing.