IL GATTOPARDO - A MODERN CLASSIC

I don’t know quite why, browsing in a bookshop in Pinner, North London in 1967, I picked up a paperback entitled The Leopard, a novel written by one Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I was studying for A levels in English Lit., French and Spanish at the time, so had no specific interest in Italy. [How that was to change!] However, the book looked interesting enough for me to buy and when I got home and started reading it I was immediately fascinated. Since then I have read it many times in Italian, “taught” it and have, of course, seen the wonderful film based upon it, in which Burt Lancaster, as the Prince of Salina, gives the performance of his life.

Set in the Risorgimento, Il Gattopardo [= "The Leopard” because there was a leopard, serval or ocelot in the coat of arms of the author's family] is the story of the last years of don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, who cannot come to terms with the changes in Sicilian society which the unification of Italy will bring.

We meet his nephew, Tancredi, who is expected to marry the Prince’s daughter, Concetta, but falls in love with Angelica Sedàra, the daughter of a rich but non-aristocratic politician, thus breaking poor Concetta’s heart. Tancredi’s marriage symbolises the transfer of power in Sicily from the aristocracy to a corrupt new middle class.

The novel is about all this and more and I have to warn you that I find the ending unbearably sad. Yet I believe it is a key to understanding Sicily today. Here is one of my favourite passages from the book. Regular readers of this blog will know which parts resonate with me!

Don Fabrizio explains his refusal of a seat in the new Senate: “ Be patient now, Chevally. We Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and did not speak our language,to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we’re made like that…… All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivian, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languour, our exotic vices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinise the enigmas of Nirvana……. I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together and perhaps more than alien pressure and various foreign invasions: this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought; which is never pretty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as should be a country made for rational beings to live in…..Six times thirty days of sun sheer down upon our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and which we struggle against with less success. If a Sicilian worked hard in any of those months he would expend energy enough for three. Then water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat… This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension is everything…. I don’t deny that a few Sicilians may succeed in breaking the spell of the island; but they would have to leave it very young….[else] they will remain convinced that their country is basically calumniated like all other countries, that the civilised norm is here, the oddities elsewhere.”

If you are going to read Il Gattopardo, or have already read it and are interested in its author, I do recommend David Gilmour’s biography of Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Last Leopard, for this, too, is a story of an aristocrat at odds with his times.

Sadly, the Donnafugata mentioned in the novel has virtually disappeared and is not the one near here, but take a walk around Baroque Modica and especially Baroque Ragusa and you may sense, as I do, the ghost of the Prince of Salina echoing your every step. I am so grateful that I can do that every day now, if I wish!