The Leopard Reconsidered

The Capuchin cemetery in Palermo is awash with light. It flows in beneath the woolly crowns of the ancient cypresses, wet from the night's rain, and splashes over a white concrete walkway that separates the mausoleums—those miniature mansions the color of old bone that house the Sicilian rich and dead—from the more modest graves, one of which holds the remains of the last prince of Lampedusa. The chattering idlers at the entry arch to this necropolis all know where the grave is; they will guide the odd literary tourist right to it, no tip required.

How unexpected that the author of The Leopard, an aristocrat with a bloodline said to reach back into the early Byzantine centuries, should lie beneath this modest stone, set apart from a jumble of flowers, fleshy angels, green urns, and other funereal symbols by a low fence of black steel. Unexpected but understandable, for the author of what many regard as the greatest work of literature to emerge from this island throughout its entire turbulent history, was living in penury when he died; most of the family lands were gone, the wealth squandered, the palaces sold off or moldering in desuetude. Neither the prince of Lampedusa nor any of his kin ever learned how to make a living in the modern world, except one, who became a diplomat. (The name Lampedusa refers to a bleak island in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Africa, which the last prince never visited. The family sold it in the nineteenth century to the Bourbon French.)

Not far beyond the rectangle of marble rises a white wall with a forest of sumac trees behind it waving their dull green fingers above and concealing part of a wooded hill. Visible above the hill are the mountains of western Sicily, so high and wild, so tightly confining that I can almost feel their shadows on my skin. On the stone are these inscriptions:

Giuseppe Tomasi Prince of Lampedusa

Died in Rome, 23 Luglio [July] 1957

Alessandra Wolff Stomersee Princess of Lampedusa

Died in Palermo, 22 Giorgno [June] 1982

Extraordinary man with an extraordinary mate: she was a Latvian baroness, a psychiatrist who introduced Freudianism to this island beneath the Italian boot, thinking, perhaps, it might help penetrate the iron-clad Sicilian ego.

A man with a mustache comes down the path with a little girl in a yellow dress. He stares briefly at the tomb to the right of the Lampedusas'. He crouches and whispers to the child, presses his face to hers. The prince's neighbor to the left, a former leader of Italy's Communist Party, came here before his time. A bold sign blares above his stone:

Pio La Torre

Assassinata Dalla Mafia 30 April, 1982

The sign calls to mind a phrase from The Leopard that alludes to one of the factors contributing to the social and political inertia that has held Sicily in thrall for generations. They are words that reveal a strategy of political deceit, words upon which the narrative of The Leopard turns.

The story opens in 1860 during the Risorgimento, a popular movement that ended the Bourbon monarchy, broke the grip of the ruling aristocratic caste, and unified the Italian peninsula for the first time since the Roman occupation. Tancredi, nephew to the prince of Salina, Don Fabrizio Corbera, has enlisted in Garibaldi's legions—his aim not to further their republican agenda but to subvert it. The prince is trying to dissuade Tancredi from putting himself in danger. Tancredi responds: "Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they'll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

They are prophetic words, specifically with regard to Italy's infamous and overly romanticized criminal organization, the Mafia. But the prince was not to be educated by his nephew. He had already heard the bell toll for his class; he had already seen many among that effete cohort, barons and dukes and their ilk, flee the island, losing their lands, palaces, and all the authority that went with these...