Il Gattopardo pt. I - Giuseppe Tomasi, principe di Lampedusa

Given the opportunity of his birthday, I would like to post a tribute to the man who has written the book that has influenced my view of modern Italy the most.


This man is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and the book is of course "Il Gattopardo" ( "The Leopard" in English, a rather inaccurate translation for the north-african serval), the only novel he ever wrote.

He was the scion of the Tomasi princes of Lampedusa, a small italian island off the coast of North Africa (hence a probable connection of the family coat of arms with the gattopardo, a feline found mostly in North Africa) granted to them already by 1558.

Giuseppe Maria Fabrizio Salvatore Stefano Vittorio Tomasi, in his full name, later principe di Lampedusa e duca di Palma e Montechiaro was born on 23 December 1896.

His father was Giulio Maria Tomasi, principe di Lampedusa e duca di Palma e Montechiaro and his mother was Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filargeri di Cutò.

"Ero un ragazzo cui piaceva la solitudine, cui piaceva di più stare con le cose che con le persone"

(I was a boy who liked solitude, who liked more being around things than around people)

In 1915 he matriculates in Law School in Rome but he is called almost immediately to the army and he is captured by the Austrohungarian troops after the ignominous disaster of Caporetto. He escapes and returns home on foot, after many adventures.

In the following years he studies foreign literature and publishes some essays.

In 1932 he marries Alexandra Wolff - Stomersee, an extraordinary woman of her own. She was the daughter of the famous opera singer Alice Barbi (who was a close friend of Clara Schumman and Johannes Brahms) and of Boris Wolff - Stomersee, a Latvian baron of Hanseatic German descent, and she became the first woman psychoanalyst in Italy.



During the Second World War, the family Palace in Palermo was destroyed by Allied bombing raids with B-24 Liberator bombers (which local newspapers called "gangsters of the sky").

In 1954 he begins to write Il Gattopardo.

The novel reflects the many social changes that Tomasi witnessed in his life, through the mirror of the Italian Risorgimento.

However, its main appeal to me is the elegy to the lost splendour of the old nobility because of the irresponsibility, bad management and the various misfortunes that befell the nobles of a decadent, obsolete monarchy, that of The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

(In a future post I will speak more of my thoughts about this wonderful novel and the movie made out of it by Visconti).

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa died of lung cancer on 23 July 1957, and was entombed five days later in the Tomasi family grave at the Capuccini cemetery of Palermo.

Having led a life of alternating suffering and decadent idleness,with few works to his credit, Giuseppe Tomasi managed to extract that one novel that vindicated himself as a man of the Letters and the Arts.

However, he was not to know this. Il Gattopardo was rejected twice, once by Mondadori ed. and once by Einaudi ed., so it was published by House Feltrinelli posthumusly in 1958.

In the end:

"Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

(We were the Leopards, the Lions; those that will come in our place will be the petty jackals, the hyenas; and the whole lot, Leopards, jackals and sheep, will continue to believe that we are the salt of the earth - trnsl. by me).