A short life of the author
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (23 December 1896 – 23 July 1957) was an Italian aristocrat and writer who produced a single novel — The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1958) — that is one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction: a sumptuous, melancholy, philosophically profound portrait of Sicilian aristocratic life during the Risorgimento (the unification of Italy, 1860–1861) that was rejected by two publishers during Lampedusa’s lifetime and became, within a few years of his death, one of the bestselling and most critically acclaimed novels in Italian literary history. The book’s central figure — Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina — is one of the most fully realised characters in modern fiction: a man of enormous intelligence, physical vitality, and aristocratic pride who watches the world he was born into dissolve and who understands, with a lucidity that is itself a form of suffering, that the new world being born will be worse.
Life
Lampedusa was born in Palermo, the last prince of an ancient Sicilian noble family. He was educated privately, served in the Italian army during World War I (he was captured by the Austrians and escaped), and lived the life of a cultivated, reclusive aristocrat: reading voraciously in several languages, travelling in Europe, and maintaining the decaying palace in Palermo that was the physical embodiment of his family’s decline. The palace was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943 — a loss that devastated Lampedusa and that reverberates through the novel’s elegiac tone.
He married Alexandra Wolff-Stomersee, a Latvian-born psychoanalyst and baroness, in 1932. He had no children. He gave informal literary lectures to a group of young intellectuals in Palermo in the 1950s and began writing The Leopard in 1954, at the age of fifty-seven.
He submitted the manuscript to the publishers Einaudi and Mondadori; both rejected it. Elio Vittorini, the influential literary editor at Einaudi, dismissed the novel as old-fashioned. Lampedusa died of lung cancer in July 1957, believing that his novel would never be published.
The Leopard (1958)
The novel was published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli (the same publisher who had brought out Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago) and was an immediate sensation. It won the Strega Prize in 1959 and has been translated into every major language.
The novel follows Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, through the years 1860–1862, as Garibaldi’s Thousand invade Sicily and the Bourbon monarchy gives way to the new Kingdom of Italy. Don Fabrizio — modelled on Lampedusa’s own great-grandfather — is an astronomer, a sensualist, a man of immense physical presence and intellectual honesty who sees clearly that the Risorgimento will destroy the aristocratic world into which he was born but who is too honest to resist it and too proud to adapt.
The novel’s most famous passage — Don Fabrizio’s conversation with the Piedmontese envoy Chevalley, in which the Prince explains why Sicily will never change — contains the line that has become the most quoted sentence in Italian literature: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” (Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi). The line is spoken not by Don Fabrizio but by his nephew Tancredi, the opportunistic young aristocrat who joins Garibaldi’s forces to ensure that the aristocracy survives the revolution by co-opting it.
The novel’s power lies in its combination of political analysis, sensory richness, and metaphysical meditation. Lampedusa renders Sicilian landscape, food, architecture, and light with a voluptuous precision; he anatomises the social dynamics of class transition with the acuity of a Marxist historian; and he frames the entire narrative within Don Fabrizio’s awareness of mortality — his own and his class’s — giving the novel the weight of a meditation on time and death.
Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation (1963), starring Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio, is one of the great films of Italian cinema.
The Stories and Other Writings
Lampedusa also wrote several short stories, collected posthumously as Racconti (1961), and a memoir of his childhood, Places of My Infancy — all of which share the novel’s elegiac tone and its preoccupation with the passage of time and the decay of beautiful things.
The One-Novel Problem
Lampedusa is the supreme case of the writer who produced a single masterpiece. The Leopard is not merely a good novel — it is one of the dozen or so greatest novels of the twentieth century, a work that stands beside The Great Gatsby, The Master and Margarita, and The Tin Drum as a novel that captures the spirit of an entire civilisation in decline. That it was written by a man with no previous literary career, rejected by the most sophisticated publishers in Italy, and published only through the intervention of Giorgio Bassani (the novelist who championed the manuscript after Lampedusa’s death) makes it one of the most improbable publishing events of the century.
Vittorini’s rejection now seems absurd, but it was intellectually consistent: the Italian literary establishment of the 1950s was committed to neorealism — to the depiction of working-class life and contemporary social problems — and The Leopard, with its aristocratic protagonist, its historical setting, and its pessimistic philosophy, looked like a throwback. What Vittorini failed to see was that Lampedusa’s novel was not a nostalgic defence of the aristocracy but a devastating analysis of the mechanisms by which ruling classes maintain their power through apparent transformation — an analysis that remains politically relevant wherever elites adapt to revolution by absorbing it.
Collecting Lampedusa
Il Gattopardo (1958, Feltrinelli, Milan) in first Italian edition is a sought-after book that brings $300–$1,000. The first English translation, The Leopard (1960, Collins/Pantheon, translated by Archibald Colquhoun), brings $50–$200. Signed copies do not exist — Lampedusa died before publication.