The Leopard

In 1860, insurrections were underway in Sicily against the Bourbon King, Francis II, ruler of the largest remaining state in Italy -- the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.  To the north, the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, under the House of Savoy, was leading a struggle for Italian unification and independence. It sent Giuseppe Garibaldi south, with a small army, to assist the rebels.  The island of Sicily fell quickly, and the rest of the kingdom, in southern Italy with its capital at Naples, fell by early 1861.

If we, meaning we Americans, read Italian history, we usually read it from the point of view of the victorious "progressives" --  the forces that led to unification and to the present Italian state.  But what about the losers?

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's historical novel The Leopard (1958) views that era from the point of view of one of the major losers, a member of the nobility under the Bourbon kingdom.  I've read allusions to The Leopard for years.  It's considered one of the landmarks in Italian literature.  A British newspaper has listed it as one of the ten greatest historical novels in any language.

I resisted reading it.  Nineteenth century Italian life -- especially Sicilian life -- sounded dusty and stuffy.  Sort of like Pinocchio, maybe, without the puppets.  But, trapped at home by Covid-19, I decided to give it a try.

The book is nothing like what I expected.  It was written in 1958, after all, not the late nineteenth century.  It gives an excellent picture of what life must have been like in 1860s Sicily, but it isn't an Italian version of Dickens or Thackeray.  The story is told from the point of view of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, a figure based on the author's own great grandfather.  The Prince is in his mid forties when the story commences in 1860.

The Leopard is not a story of famous battles, smoldering romances, or dueling opponents.  The plot is minimal.

Instead, it shows us a view of traditional Sicilian life and attitudes, of princely splendors side by side with grinding poverty.  But it's more than that, and deeper.  It is a picture of what life was like for a man who was at the top of his society as he watched that society gradually fall apart about him, and be swept away as new classes came into power.  A man who watches his family's great land holdings be lost, piece by piece, through the improvidence of younger members of the family, members of a younger generation who care only for spending money.  And who watches himself grow older, year by year, fading away at the same time as his family's assets and reputation are either squandered or lost through development of a non-aristocratic society.

The new Italy, imposed from the north, was part of Western European civilization.  Its hopes and ideals were foreign to Sicily, unwelcome to Sicily.  Don Fabrizio tells a sympathetic northerner:

In Sicily it doesn't matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all.  We are old, Chevalley, very old. ... We're as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England, and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we've been a colony.  I don't say that in complaint; it's our fault.  But even so we're worn out and exhausted.

Don Fabrizio's marriage was already merely one of convenience by the time the story begins.  "Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.  He knew what love was."  His children were dull and disappointing.  His adopted nephew, Tancredi, had the fire, the quickness of mind, the subtlety of humor, that appealed to him, but Tancredi chose to marry the beautiful but shallow daughter of a highly successful peasant turned entrepreneur, an arriviste whose lack of social finesse appalled the older Prince.

Yes, the Prince was a snob, but that was expected and desired in the society in which he had been born.  He was also more compassionate than expected, a compassion that also accompanied an occasional unintended or unconscious cruelty.  And he was an intellectual, a studious man who spent much of his time on his rooftop, observing the heavens through his collection of telescopes.  He received a scientific award for his observations of a visiting comet.

In the penultimate chapter, the story leaps forward from 1861 to 1888, as the Prince prepares to die.  He broods that he has felt the life flowing out of himself, like sand through an hourglass, for years.  Now it is rushing out faster.   He observes his relatives clustered about him, only Tancredi showing real sorrow.  Many friends, many members of his family have died.  No one has excelled.  He has a grandson: "so handsome, so lively, so dear ... So odious."  One of the new sort of people, interested only in pleasure.

He himself [Don Fabrizio] would be merely a memory of a choleric old grandfather who had collapsed one July afternoon just in time to prevent the boy's going off to Livorno for sea bathing.

He heard the expected tinkling bell as a priest came to give him the last rites.  He couldn't think of what to confess.

Not that he felt himself innocent; but his whole life was blameworthy, not this or that single act in it; and now he no longer had time to say so.

He tries to recall all the happy times of his life.

I'm seventy-three years old, and all in all I may have lived, really lived a total of two ... three at the most.

And with that dispiriting thought, he fades away, along with the Sicilian life with which he had been familiar.

The Leopard is a warm and sympathetic story about a fascinating Sicilian aristocrat, but it's also a story of decay -- decay of a society, decay of a family, decay of the man himself.  Read it, but don't expect to finish up with a song in your heart.