Movies - The Leopard

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Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento. Published posthumously in 1958, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in Italian literature.

Background

Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily, and he had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his grandfather, another Prince of Lampedusa. After the Lampedusa palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it.

Most of the novel is set during the time of the Risorgimento, specifically during the period when Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Italian unification, swept through Sicily with his forces, known as The Thousand.

Plot

The story focuses on an aristocratic family headed by a charismatic Prince named Don Fabrizio, and the bulk of the novel is told from his individual perspective. As the novel opens in 1848, Garibaldi's Redshirts are about to topple the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, completing the unification of Italy. Don Fabrizio finds the corpse of a government soldier killed by the Redshirts on his property, forcing him to acknowledge the coming change in Sicilian society, even as his family continues its empty aristocratic life in blissful ignorance.

We meet Tancredi Falconeri, the son of Don Fabrizio's wastrel brother. Tancredi is handsome and witty, with grand ambitions but no fortune behind him to allow him to fulfill his goals. With the family at their summer retreat in Donnafugata, Tancredi appears set to wed his cousin (and Don Fabrizio's daughter), Concetta, when he sees Angelica Sedara, a girl of eighteen who has just returned to Donnafugata after four years at a finishing school in Florence. Formerly awkward and unpolished, Angelica is now a stunning beauty and exhibits a formal if somewhat superficial polish that more than suffices to catch Tancredi's eye. The two immediately begin a courtship that includes several walks through the unused and decaying rooms of the Corbera family palace, providing the reader with a metaphorical rendering of the decline of the Italian aristocracy's importance and moral relevance.

As the novel progresses, Don Fabrizio finds himself in an existential crisis that none of his family members or confidants can understand; aristocracy was once its own reason for being, but with that gone, what is Don Fabrizio's purpose in life? Tancredi's marriage to Angelica serves as a symbol of the transfer of power from the patrician to the plebeian, from the privileged to the opportunistic. The text is littered with hints that Tancredi and Angelica's marriage was not altogether a happy one, but was a productive one for the ambitions of both of its participants.

As the novel winds to a close, we see Don Fabrizio in his death throes, contemplating not his own future but that of his family and his life. The novel ends in 1910 with the Corbera line reaching its end with Concetta, now a spinster in her 70s, conversing with the widowed Angelica and ultimately deciding to discard long-held material possessions that were reminders of her family's past, long since rendered irrelevant by history.

Characters

The central character in the novel is Don Fabrizio Corbera, the charismatic Prince of Salina, who dabbles in astronomy and mathematics. Fabrizio recognizes the tremendous changes coming to Italian society and what that means for himself, his family, and the aristocracy in general.

Don Fabrizio's nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, plays a supporting role as a new form of aristocrat, one who parlays the declining value of his family name into political power through his interpersonal skills and via marriage to the wealthy and beautiful but untitled Angelica Sedora, daughter of the crude Don Calogero Sedora, who has made his money by capitalizing on the chaos sown by the Redshirts.

Other characters include Father Pirrone, the Corbera family priest; Concetta Corbera, Don Fabrizio's daughter, who appears destined to marry her cousin Tancredi but who is spurned by him when Angelica arrives; Maria Stella, Don Fabrizio's wife; and Bendicò, Don Fabrizio's faithful dog, who serves a symbolic purpose throughout the book, even after his death.

Controversy

The novel was assailed from all sides upon its publication. Conservative elements criticized its unflattering portrayal of the Catholic Church and clergy as corrupt and concerned with earthly ideals. Liberal elements attacked the novel for its apparent opposition to Italian unification and the death of the aristocracy.

However, the novel was later to gain great critical acclaim, notably from English novelist E.M. Forster.

Title

Despite being universally known in English as The Leopard, the original title Il Gattopardo actually refers to a serval. Although uncommon north of the Sahara Desert, one of the serval's few North African ranges is quite near Lampedusa.

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