THE LEOPARD – Novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was born in Palermo in 1896. He was a boy who liked solitude, who liked to be with more things than with people. That son of an aristocratic family – who had made long journeys in Europe – was a passionate reader of books, and had devoted to fiction the last years of his life. To a literary conference, he met Eugenio Montale, and was returning from that trip that he began writing The Leopard. From the novel, was born in 1963 the eponymous film by director Luchino Visconti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHIsJszVBJU&list=PL_NxET4JRIz-6KJYzYnwxpMIWXovvSB40 In 1932, he married in the Orthodox Church of Riga scholar of psychoanalysis Alexandra Wolff Stomersee, but ee has always remained emotionally very attached to his mother, a woman with a strong personality, which has had great influence on the future as a writer. In a summer day in 1957, his body was buried in the family tomb at the cemetery of Palermo Capuchin.

The Leopard https://www.amazon.com/Leopard-Novel-Giuseppe-Lampedusa/dp/0375714790 was his most famous success, especially for the ironic representation of historical and social changes of the Italian Risorgimento. The title of the novel refers to the emblem of the House of Salina (depicting a cat from leopard fur on a blue background). If you want to read this book, you will need to remember that it is an existentialist novel, that is imbued with a philosophy that is characterized by human action distrust. For this reason, even in Leopard, you find pages where everyday existence is described as a random sequence of events against which man can not do anything. Like a collage, the novel takes place for moments narratively unrelated to each other, because they are the individual stories of the characters to represent the narrative thread. You know Don Fabrizio Salina (the central figure of the novel, a Sicilian ancient patrician origins), whose lineage has always been respected by the inhabitants of their fiefdoms. You know Donnafugata, a fief of Salina, where they have their summer residence. Page after page, you will know even the Piedmontese Chevalley and the priest Salina home, Father Pirrone.