The Leopard

After I visited Sicily at 22 (the same age as Mariella in the book) and stayed with relatives in Siracusa, I fell in love with Sicily (and all of Italy) and wanted to know everything I could about it, its history, its customs, architecture, food, and especially to understand the collective psyche of its people. 

My grandmother was born in Sicily and never spoke English even after moving to the United States, and my uncles and father spent a good part of their childhoods in Catania, where the Sicily part of Becoming Mariella takes place. I had never before felt… show more.

It’s 1860, and Garibaldi's Redshirts have landed on the coast. Sicily’s ancient feudal society will soon be overthrown.

These historical events are the backdrop to an intriguing portrait of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, a quiet, intense, and, in many ways, sympathetic member of the doomed Sicilian nobility. War is upon him, and yet Don Fabrizio continues his stately life and loves with meditative detachment.

This may be a story of civil war and social upheaval, but it is also a depiction of ancient families and allegiances, dusty landscapes, and the night sky. It is filled with rich symbolism… show more.

I loved this novel, The Leopard because it created a character and a world ( that of mid-19th century Sicily) about which I had known very little.

The author draws us into the mind and culture of aristocratic Sicily, placing it in the historical context of the political activist Garibaldi and the unification of Italy, but always giving us the emotional and psychological intensity of the characters’ lives.

I also loved it because I was planning a trip to Sicily – and now that I am here, I feel I have a much deeper insight into this rich and fascinating… show more.

This is the novel to read if you want to submerge yourself in Sicily’s culture and history.

I read it during a visit to Italy, and was sucked right into this tale of an aristocratic Sicilian family decaying in the 19th century in the time of Garibaldi’s revolution. I really despised the patriarch Don Fabrizio, and was still fascinated by the choices he had to make to keep his family status in turbulent times.

Once you finish the book, check out the 1963 film starring Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.

E. M. Forster famously described Lampedusa’s solitary work as “one of the great lonely books.” It is a masterpiece that simultaneously captures both the peculiarity of Sicily within the experience of the wars of Italian Unification while brilliantly portraying characters confronting universal human emotions of love, loss, and struggle in times of momentous change. Lampedusa based the book’s protagonist, the Prince of Salina, on his own grandfather. The story, told in a series of episodes across half a century, while fictionalized, captures the essential elements of the birth of the modern Italian state, the rise of a new class of… show more.

I love this book because for me it’s the ultimate historical novel; a great epic set in a tumultuous landscape beautifully crafted and utterly engaging. The perfect blend of the personal and the political woven into gloriously intricate emotions. It taught me the importance of character and how the psychology of ambition can shape a whole life as well as destroy a family. The ultimate artistry I inspire towards as a writer, that creates the visceral, vivid landscape I like to get lost in as a reader. 

Set in 19th-century Sicily, this luscious novel reveals the fragility of foundations—of self, of class, of kingdom. The story focuses on the decadent and decaying Italian aristocracy amidst the political upheavals of the 1860s. The main protagonists are the Salina family, above all the patriarch Don Fabrizio, who must accept change if things are to remain the same. A central theme is demise and the fading of beauty, sublimely rendered in rich language that details the scents, colors, and textures of a crumbling family seat.

Lampedusa could make a dish of macaroni cheese voluptuous and a basket full of peaches revolutionary. This author had a wonderful appreciation of the pleasures of the senses, and a great gift for making sensuality politically significant. 

In 1860 the palace of Donnafugata, the summer retreat of a fictional family of Sicilian aristocrats, is remote from the cities where Garibaldi and his followers are precipitating a nationalist revolution, but the chill of impending change is in the air, along with an anticipatory nostalgia for the decadent beauty that is passing away. 

Politically radical Prince Tancredi and his bourgeois sweetheart devote… show more.