"The Leopard" in the modern era: from Lampedusa's pen to the Netflix screen

A remake of a classic always draws comparisons. This is what happened with the release of The Leopard on Netflix . The first reference to consider is Luchino Visconti 's 1963 film of the same name (another classic in its own right). Behind these two audiovisual interpretations , crafted from different period sensibilities, lies a literary masterpiece.

This is the only novel by Giuseppe Tomasi (1896-1957), Prince of Lampedusa and Duke of Palma, who never saw it published . After two unsuccessful attempts at publishing with Mondadori and Einaudi, Feltrinelli, still a child at the time, took the risk.

It was a great success. A resounding sales success , The Leopard (1958) became the center of critical debate, received the Strega Prize, and became the most widely distributed Italian short story of the 20th century.

The story, which begins in 1860 (with Garibaldi's landing in Marsala) and ends in 1910, focuses on some key moments in the life of a noble Sicilian family (the Corberas of Salina), which expose the political and social transformations brought about by Italian unity.

In the years immediately preceding the writing of the novel , a similar, and even greater, historical upheaval took place on a global scale . In Italy, the Allied victory in the Second World War definitively overthrew the Savoy monarchy enthroned by Garibaldi, who had agreed to ally himself with Fascism, and a republican regime was established.

It's no coincidence that The Leopard was written in this context. Nor is it a coincidence that interest in this work is resurfacing today . We find ourselves in another pivotal moment , with a reorganization that marches to the rhythm of the new right, the threat of global conflict, and dizzying technological developments that could be placing us on the threshold of a "post-human" era.

Tomasi da Lampedusa was also driven by powerful personal motives . He had fought in both major wars and was under the impact of heavy losses, one of them crucial. The Lampedusa Palace in Palermo, with its ancestral, intimate, and historic heritage, had been destroyed during the American bombing of 1943.

He says of that house in his memoirs: “I loved it with total devotion. And I love it even now, twelve years after it became a mere memory. Until a few months before its destruction, I slept in the room where I was born , four meters from where they had placed my mother's bed during the birth. And I rejoiced in the certainty that in that house, perhaps in that very room, I would die.”

From this absence, from this memorial act, the novel itself emerges , which can be read as autofiction: as the writer points out in his letter to Baron Enrico Merlo, the protagonist figure of Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, whose family emblem is the “gattopardo” (marbled leopard) is inspired by the author's great-grandfather: Giulio Gabrizio Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa.

The village of Donnafugata is reminiscent of Palma (the Lampedusa duchy), and its palace evokes the Filangeri-Cutò family estate in Santa Margherita di Belice, where the writer spent many of his childhood summers.

The emblematic phrase of the so-called "Glotopardism": "If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change" , is not uttered by Prince Salina but by his beloved, charming and unscrupulous nephew Tancredi Falconeri, when he says goodbye to his uncle to join Garibaldi's forces.

Don Fabrizio refuses to jump on the revolutionary bandwagon and its deceptively new order. But he knows that without this essential "recycling," without this aggiornamento , the aristocrats will be excluded from power and social preeminence. That's why he supports Tancredi and blesses his marriage to the commoner Angelica Sedàra, who brings him her splendid beauty and the equally splendid fortune of her father, the mayor of Donnafugata, a politician and rising bourgeois of peasant origin.

Beyond the political circumstances of the time, Fabrizio Corbera expresses his theory on the invariable essence of Sicily , invaded and colonized for millennia, wrapped in a perpetual dream and in the fatalism of an excessive landscape and climate.

Sicilians don't aspire to improve, he tells Chevalley , sent by the central government to convince him to accept a senate seat; it's impossible for them to do so because they already consider themselves perfect. They call this feeling "pride," but in reality, it's a blindness that will prevent any self-recognition, any true progress.

There was no shortage of critics who saw The Leopard as a reactionary novel , due to Salina's skepticism regarding the effects of revolutions. Today, it is considered an undisputed classic that, as such, speaks to human complexity and, therefore, to ambition, plunder, and betrayal as other driving forces of history.

Furthermore, those of Salina and Tancredi are not the only voices heard. The novel not only addresses the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, but also the popular sectors , beyond simplistic idealization. Among the peasantry, the marriage arrangement of Father Pirrone's niece with her interested seducer reproduces on a small scale the relationships of interest that mediate between Angelica and Tancredi.

Beyond the Social Map , this is a novel of the senses , feelings, passions, and emotions, from sexuality and eroticism to aesthetic contemplation. Lampedusa, a consummate prose writer, and the baroque and ironic Sicilian Proust, dazzles with his sensual refinement and introspective subtlety.

The description of the gardens of Donnafugata, or of its labyrinth of palatial rooms where the carnal passion of Tancredi and Angelica erupts, but is not consummated; the final reverie of the dying prince as he reviews his life, are among the highest moments of 20th-century narrative.

Although he did not achieve universal repercussion, I would like to mention another master of historical fiction and prose, belonging to the same literary "family": our Manuel Mujica Láinez , whose great Buenos Aires novels anticipated those of Lampedusa and who painted like no one else in Argentina the brilliance and decadence of an aristocratic class, also marked by inbreeding, extravagance and dedication to sterile hobbies.

Just as in Mujica's novel Los idols (1953), the spinsters of the impoverished family with the coat of arms of the burning tower absurdly embroider, for years, a copy of a medieval tapestry, the Salina girls, daughters of the Leopard, dedicate their old age to increasing a collection of false relics.

Lampedusa's current return in serial format neither reproduces nor replaces his novel. It does reinterpret it, with some additions and plot modifications that could be discussed. But it is, without a doubt, a good incentive to return to this fundamental text or to rediscover it. No one will be disappointed.