The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (week 2)
Details
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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.
Schedule:
- Week 1: Ch. 1-3
- Week 2: Ch. 3-8
The Leopard:
Supplemental:
- The Leopard - Visconti and Mortality video essay on the 1963 movie adaptation
- The Leopard Netflix trailer
- Radio play 1h35m
- Giuseppe Garibaldi: One of the Greatest Generals of Modern Times video essay on the historical background
- Guiseppe Garibaldi
Extracts:
- "As witness Naples long in chains / Exposed dishevelled by the sea— / Ah, so much more her beauty drew, / Till Savoy’s red-shirt Perseus flew / And cut that fair Andromeda free." ("Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry")
- "...Garibaldi sped thereon: / This movement’s rush sufficing there / To rout King Fanny, Bomba’s heir, / ... The banished Bullock from the Pampas / Trampling the royal levies massed. / And, later: He has swum the Strait, / And in Calabria making head, / Cheered by the peasants garlanded, / Pushes for Naples’ nearest gate. / From that red Taurus plunging on / With lowered horns and forehead dun, / Shall matadores save Bomba’s son?" ("Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry")
- "And costume too they touch upon: / The Cid, his net-work shirt of mail, / And Garibaldi’s woolen one: / In higher art would each avail" ("Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry")
- "There’s Garibaldi, off-hand hero, / A very Cid Campeadôr, / Lion-Nemesis of Naples’ Nero— / But, tut, why tell that story o’er! / A natural knight-errant, truly, / Nor priding him in parrying fence, / But charging at the helm-piece—hence / By statesmen deemed a lord unruly." ("Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry")
- "But Garibaldi—Naples’ host / Uncovers to her deliverer’s ghost, / While down time’s aisle, mid clarions clear / Pale glory walks by valor’s bier." ("Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry")
- "Be Borgia Pope, be Bomba King / The roses blow, the song-birds sing." ("Marquis de Grandvin at the Hostelry," Epigraph)
- "I have sailed with lords and marquises for captains; and the King of the Two Sicilies has passed me, as I here stood up at my gun." (White-Jacket, 4)
This meetup is part of the series The Risorgimento.