Tomasi di Lampedusa started writing his most famous novel towards the end of 1954. The initial idea was to tell about a day in his great grandfather's life at the time of Garibaldi's landing in Sicily. But immediately on starting the Author had to face the difficulties implicit in his choice of narrative technique: the novel was supposed to have been built in accordance with the technique frequently used by James Joyce in his works. However, he "had underestimated the relationship between narrated time and narrative time". As his adopted son tells us, Tomasi soon admitted that he was not up to writing "a second Ulysses" and he chose a time structure that expanded over a period of fifty years: "1860-62, Garibaldi's landing (first and second chapters, set in Palermo and at Donnafugata); 1883, death of the prince (third chapter); 1910, the end of everything (fourth conclusive chapter)".
While he was working at it, new material added to the original scheme and more chapters were included, revealing a long and not at all easy gestation. According to a source close to Tomasi, "the novel was written like an "accordion" since the chapters appeared from one season to the next...like mushrooms", until it reached its final form in 1956. Final, perhaps, not because the Author wanted it as such: he would have liked to add at least one or two chapters, but his incipient illness forced him to desist.
Once the work had been completed the main problem was its publication. There were numberless attempts to contact different publishers (Mondadori, Einaudi, Longanesi), but although they all seemed to appreciate his work, in the end they all refused it.
The Leopard was published, posthumously, on 11th November 1958 by Feltrinelli. Its success was extraordinary, sudden and unexpected even for the editor himself: suffice it to say that the first print run, three thousand copies, was sold entirely before Christmas, and the second, four thousand, could not be found anywhere by the 6th of January. In a few months the novel sold more than seventy thousand copies: its popularity was, by then, indisputable. On 7th July 1959 The Leopard was awarded the Strega prize.
Such public consensus immediately attracted the attention of the critics, until then not very favourable to new writers. The question that passionately divided intellectuals, however, was not so much the debate on the novel's aesthetic quality, but rather the dispute on Tomasi's historical vision, and especially his interpretation of the Italian unification process.
It was in this general atmosphere of attention, often polemic, and of contrasts, that Luchino Visconti decided to make the novel into a film: he was seduced by the figure of the prince of Salina who stood out in the novel, magnified by Tomasi in order to mythicize aristocratic values opposing them to the vulgarity of the new men; he was fascinated by the way Tomasi interiorised the events, and as a consequence depicted a deformed universe as experienced through the Author's changing perception; he was struck by the lucid description of the taking in again of the values of the Risorgimento, through political evolutionism, with an inevitable contradiction between the actual fall of the old world and the unaccomplished creation of a new one.
The magnificent fresco that the film's images paint is fascinating and seductive. Taking into account the necessary cuts and alterations imposed by stage setting needs, the result is evocative and, on the whole, the film version is faithful to the literary work. The reconstruction of the places and the search for setting, although not always faithful to the author's descriptions, build up a remarkable interpretation of his thought, of his poetics, and have greatly contributed to the success that The Leopard still has with contemporary audiences.

The Plot