Search results
Although Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a prolific reader, until the last few years of his life he had written almost nothing for publication. He first conceived the book that became The Leopard in the 1930s, but did not follow through on the idea at that time. [3]
- Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Archibald Colquhoun
- 1958
The Leopard, novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published in 1958 as Il gattopardo. The novel is a psychological study of Don Fabrizio , prince of Salina (called the Leopard, after his family crest), who witnesses with detachment the transfer of power in Sicily from the old Bourbon aristocracy to the new Kingdom of Italy and the grasping, unscrupulous liberal bourgeoisie during the 1860s.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jun 22, 2020 · The Leopard () is one of the greatest Italian literary works of the 20th century. Since its publication in 1958, it has been regarded as a classic of European literature. Written by a Sicilian ...
The Leopard is set during a period of Italy’s history known as the Risorgimento, or “resurgence.”. The Risorgimento, beginning in 1848, led to the consolidation of various independent Italian states into a unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861. An Italian nationalist and general named Giuseppe Garibaldi was key to this effort.
- Events in History at The Time The Novel Takes Place
- The Novel in Focus
- Events in History at The Time The Novel Was Written
- For More Information
Sicily during the nineteenth century—an overview
For much of its existence, the island ofSicily, at the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula, has been dominated by one foreign power or another. A branch of the Spanish Bourbons ruled Naples and Sicily as a single entity from the mid-eighteenth century, but the family’s was deposed during the Italian campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte (1796-1814). By 1814 Napoleon had extended his dominion over most of the Italian peninsula, ruling it as a single kingdom. He was emperor of a France that had...
SECRET SOCIETIES
During the Napoleonic period (1793-1815) secret societies flourished in Italy, especially in the South. Driven underground by She police, these groups met clandestinely to spread nationalist sympathy and express solidarity against the foreign invaders. The most famous of these societies was the carbonari (charcoal burners), so called because they would meet in caves around charcoal fires. The carbonari, who belonged mostly to the lower and middle classes, continued to meet during the 1820s an...
Garibaldi’s Sicilian campaign
The most pivotal historical event described in The Leopard is Giuseppe Garibaldi’s successful invasion of Sicily in 1860. Garibaldi, born in Nice in 1807, was a sailor who became a key figure of the Risorgimento. Flamboyant and charismatic, Garibaldi joined the Mazzinian secret society, Young Italy. After a series of failed nationalist insurrections, however, Garibaldi and other disciples of Mazzini were forced to flee abroad. For 12 years Garibaldi devoted himself to the cause of freedom in...
Plot summary
The Leopard, a reference to the Salinas’s ancestral coat-of-arms, consists of eight episodic chapters, most of them set in the early1860s. The chapters detail the life and death of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. Physically powerful but emotionally passive, Don Fabrizio engages in aristocratic pastimes like hunting and astronomy, presides with benign indifference over his large family’s, visits his mistress, and observes the changes sweeping through Italy in the wake of national unifi...
THE VOICE OF THE SOUTHERNERS?
During the earliest stages of unification, to gauge the popular opinion of annexation of a region by the Piedmont, Cavour relied upon plebiscites, which polled the individual residents of the given region, In October 1860 plebiscites were held in Naples, Sicily, Umbria, and the Marches; voters were asked to respond with “yes” or “no” to the proposal of becoming part of a new and indivisible nation, with Victor Emmanuel as their constitutional king. The final results—all of which favored unifi...
A family’s decline
Many critics have commented that death and dying are evoked from the very first line of The Leopard, which is taken from the daily reading of the rosary: “Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,” meaning “Now and in the hour of our death” (The Leopard, p. 25). Images of death and decay permeate the novel: the mortally wounded government soldier who dies in the Prince’s garden, the rabbit killed during the Prince’s hunt, the Prince’s own lingering demise in a hotel room, and even the stuffed corpse of...
Italy after World War II
Dramatic changes took place in Italy after World War II. On April 25, 1945, a joint effort, an Allied military offensive along with a popular insurrection led by the anti-Fascist Resistance, put an end to 23 years of Fascist regime and two years of Nazi-Fascist occupation of the Italian North. Italy now faced not only the difficult task of reconstruction but also that of national reconciliation after the two years of civil war between anti-Fascist partisans and Nazi-Fascists. The division was...
Reception
Published a year after Lampedusa’s death, The Leopard became an enormous popular success, first in Italy, then in Europe. Critics, however, were sharply divided on the novel’s merit. Carlo Bo, who wrote the novel’s first review for La Stampa, was favorably impressed; a few years later, he recalled, “I opened [The Leopard] with the certainty that by the fiftieth page I would have nothing more to do with it, but it was not like that. I needed only a few pages … to understand that this Sicilian...
Davison, Dorothy P., ed. Book Review Digest. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1961. Duggan, Christopher. A Concise History of Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994. Finley, M. I., Denis Mack Smith, and Christopher Duggan. A History of Sicily. New York: Viking, 1987. Gatt-Rutter, John. Writers and Politics in Modern Italy. New York: Holmes & Meie...
Jul 28, 2008 · Pantheon published "The Leopard" in the United States in 1960, to further acclaim. While the novel was an immediate success in Italy, going through 52 editions in the first four months, not all ...
People also ask
When was the leopard published?
When did Giuseppe Tomasi write the leopard?
When did the leopard become a bestseller?
Why is the leopard a classic of Italian literature?
When did pantheon publish the leopard?
How many copies did the leopard sell?
Giuseppe Di Lampedusa. The Leopard Summary. Chapter 1. Introduction to the Prince. In May 1860, the Salinas—a Sicilian noble family who lives in a palace outside Palermo, Sicily—have just finished their daily Rosary recitation. The ceiling of the ornate drawing room is painted with ancient Roman deities holding the family shield, which ...
