What The Leopard is really about

Written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa at the end of his life in the late 1950s, it is a novel about the collapse – one century beforehand as a result of the reunification of Italy – of the Sicilian aristocracy of which his family was a part, and its replacement with what was called democracy. It also explains, oddly perhaps, the rise of the Sicilian Mafia without once even mentioning the word ‘Mafia’.

Il Gattopardo – actually the word means ‘serval’, not ‘leopard’ – so named after the small wild cat on the family’s coat of arms – was the only book Tomasi, Prince of Salina, ever wrote. He failed to find a publisher while he was alive. Mondadori and Einaudi both turned it down. However, soon after his death in 1957, aged 60 from cancer, Feltrinelli agreed to publish it and this happened in 1958, the year of my own birth.

It became an instant hit and is often talked about as the greatest ever novel written by an Italian. Film