Piccolo had been invited on the basis of his recently published poetry, and brought Tomasi as a guest. In 1954 Tomasi traveled in with his cousin Lucio Piccolo, another late-in-life author, to a literary conference in San Pellegrino Terme. He first conceived the book that became The Leopard in the 1930s but did not follow through on the idea at that time. The process of writing the novel Īlthough Tomasi was a prolific reader, until the last few years of his life he had written almost nothing for publication. The symbol on the Tomasi di Lampedusa coat of arms is the serval, and though unusual, servals were owned by some Sicilians as exotic pets. Although uncommon north of the Sahara Desert, one of the serval's few North African ranges is quite near Lampedusa. He began writing Il Gattopardo only two-and-a-half years before his own death at age 60.ĭespite being universally known in English as The Leopard, the original Italian title is Il Gattopardo which refers to the serval, a much smaller animal. The Lampedusa Palace in Palermo was bombed and pillaged during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 while Tomasi's mother returned in 1945 to live out the last year of her life in the ruin, Tomasi and his wife, the psychoanalyst Alexandra von Wolff-Stomersee settled in a rundown, though well-architected, villa elsewhere in town, where he lived out the rest of his life. He had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa. Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily. The novel was also made into an award-winning 1963 film of the same name, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "the 10 best historical novels". In 1959, it won Italy's highest award for fiction, the Strega Prize. Published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli, after two rejections by the leading Italian publishing houses Mondadori and Einaudi, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. The Leopard ( Italian: Il Gattopardo ) is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento.
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