The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (week 1)

This meetup is hosted by Wisdom and Woe. For more details and to sign up for this event, go to: https://www.meetup.com/wisdom-and-woe/events/276021373

The Leopard (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958) begins in 1860 in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. King Ferdinand II ("Bomba") has died, and Garibaldi's Redshirts have just landed on the Italian coast to initiate a military campaign known as the "Expedition of the Thousand." As Garibaldi's army inevitably presses inland, it portends the collapse of the existing feudal order and the emergence of a unified Italian state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

In the throes of this revolutionary upheaval is Prince Don Fabrizio--decadent patriarch of the aristocratic Salina dynasty with a pride befitting "the leopard" (actually a serval) of his family crest. Fabrizio is simultaneously a staunch Catholic and a consummate womanizer, with a sort of codependent relationship to both sin and confession. Even as the approaching army threatens his family, fortune, and fate with extinction, his favorite nephew, Tancredi, joins Garibaldi's forces, declaring paradoxically, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Controversial at its release, The Leopard soon became a best-seller and is today considered a masterpiece of world literature, often counted among the greatest novels of all time. E. M. Forster called it "one of the great lonely books," known for its depiction of human frailty and melancholy, its poetic "description of a civilization in decline," and its "comfortless and irrational" Sicilian landscape. In 1963, it was adapted into an award-winning film starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale, and as a Netflix series in 2025.

Wisdom and Woe is a philosophy and literature discussion group dedicated to exploring the world, work, life, and times of Herman Melville and the 19th century Romantic movement. The group is free and open to anybody with an interest in learning and growing by "diving deeper" into "time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters."