LONDON
England, and London especially, are of great importance in the "journey" through Tomasi's life. Tomasi went to London for the first time in 1920; he returned there several times, sometimes for long periods, staying with his uncle Giulio Tomasi della Torretta, an Italian ambassador at the court of England.
But the comfortable, privileged and family hospitality of Don Fabrizio's "heretical town" certainly wasn't the only aspect luring him to London. Actually, Tomasi had already been infected by that love and admiration for English culture and civilisation that would characterise him for the rest of his life and that would result in 1954 in the lessons in English literature that the author gave to Francesco Orlando. There was something in that culture that deeply fascinated him. The British spirit and temperament, so strong, determined and practical in the pursuit of clear goals, yet so naturally distinguished with its halftones, its understatements, its irony, its eccentric practices, its discretion.
To him all this was so immeasurably distant from Italian vainglory and provincialism, and even opposed to the nature of Sicilian culture and societies, so permeated, in his opinion, with a basic irrationality that conjugated a deep feeling of distrust in action, manifested through idleness and fatalism, with the absurd conviction that they were "salt of the earth".
Tomasi may have raved his own "redemption" for some time. The idea of moving to England, of deserting his "too comfortable existence, in the wealth of Palermo" to become a bourgeois living on his own, even humble, job must have crossed his mind. But perhaps it was already too late to take this step: "when you're twenty it's too late, the crust has already taken shape", he will make Don Fabrizio say, with a touch of regret.
But London is still the place where Tomasi tried to start on a professional career, as a man of letters, of course. His uncle had provided him with a small room at the embassy with a desk and a small sofa, providing him also with a typewriter, and probably with a typist, seeing that Tomasi could not type, nor did he ever learn to. It was in that room that Tomasi spent long hours during his stay in London reading and writing essays, among which the one on Yeats, which he published in 1926 in the magazine "Le opere e i giorni" (Works and Days).
The rest of Tomasi's days were spent indulging in mundane life and in solitary explorations of the city following in the footsteps of his most beloved authors. He often accompanied uncle Pietro to official ceremonies, to watch the horse racing at Ascot and to St. James' Park.
In St. James' Street, in the incredible emporiums selling luxury articles for men, he discovered a shop window displaying a single book, The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, "the most English among Englishmen: the typical Englishman".
At Will's Coffee House he found the table where, towards the middle of the XVII century, John Dryden, with his unmistakable Baroque touch, wrote sublime love poems and extravagant tragicomic plays.
In South Kensington he discovered the portrait of Mary Fitton, the Dark Lady loved by Shakespeare and by his friend the Earl of South Hampton. He was fascinated by it; just as he was by another female figure, Maude Gonne, the inspirer of Yeats's poetry. Several years later, he would write about her in his notes on English literature: "she remains in my memory as the most beautiful creature I have ever seen".
And more, he loved wandering through the forest of buildings, through the intricate maze of the old town, in Dickens's London, discovering its atmosphere, so magical and real at the same time, and its multicoloured human types, so tragic as to be comical.
But starting from 1925 Tomasi was no longer alone in experiencing the emotions of his extremely personal "sentimental tour" through the English capital. That same year, in fact, he had met Licy, who would become his wife five years later. The intellectual understanding between the two young people was deep from the very start, and it remained so for the rest of their lives even through the changing fortunes of a particularly complex and difficult conjugal relationship.

RIGA
With its indefinable geopolitical position and its ancient cultural heritage, the town of Riga plays an important role in Giuseppe Tomasi's biography, especially in the sentimental one.
One could say that the prince of Lampedusa's attraction for foreign things, more directed to the East, found in Riga its alcove, with implications that involve the depths of his psyche.
It was in fact in the Latvian capital - founded in 1201 and long contended by Poland, Sweden and Russia - that he married Alessandra Wolff Stomersee (known as Licy) in an Orthodox church, on 24th August 1932.
The two of them had met in London, at the Italian embassy, in 1925, and two years later, Giuseppe had gone to visit Stomersee castle in Latvia.
Although the couple had settled at Palazzo Lampedusa in Palermo, between 1933 and 1939 Licy divided her life between Stomersee and Riga, spending in Palermo only occasional short periods. Her husband on the other hand generally moved to Riga in the summer periods.
In spite of its neutrality, Latvia was annexed to USSR on 4th August 1940. But Licy had already left Latvia the previous year, after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact had been signed, and had taken refuge in Rome.
However, even after the German occupation in 1941, Riga remained a regular destination for Licy, who, besides, did not give up her frequent visits to Stomersee. It was only in December 1942 that Licy left the Baltic for good, just before the Soviet advance absorbed it.

ROME
Giuseppe Tomasi's geographical biography repeatedly and fatefully involves Rome. It was in Rome that he enrolled at the Law Faculty on 26th April 1915. And it was there that, after four years, he took his exam in Constitutional Law, the only one in his career, in July 1919. We see him again in Rome in 1930 with Licy Wolff Stomersee. And in 1932, again in Rome - while he was staying at the Hotel Quirinale and she was staying in Via Brenta, with uncle Pietro, the marquis of Torretta - that the two fiancés exchanged love letters. But in 1939 the war prevailed over feelings, and Tomasi was recalled for military service and summoned, on 14th December, to Nettuno. His appointment with fate was still distant. It was only in 1957 that Tomasi became aware of blood traces in his expectoration. After being first diagnosed lung carcinoma by Professor Turchetti in Palermo, Tomasi left for Rome on 29th May with Licy. He was treated with cobalt radiotherapy at Villa Angela nursing home. But on 1st July he moved to his sister in law Olga Wolff Bianchieri's home. He hardly had a month left to live. On 23rd July he died at dawn. Two days later the funerals took place in the Basilica del Sacro Cuore di Gesù. He wasn't even given Don Fabrizio's consolation, that of going back home to die there, after a useless consultation with professor Semola in Naples, an omen that he expressed with heart-rending resignation in his last letter bearing the date Rome 12th July: "all I long for - he wrote to Gioacchino Lanza- is to be able to come back home to spend there peacefully, these last months or weeks, whatever they might be, seeing every now and then my dear young men if they are willing to".
But who knows if Don Giuseppe, in his last moments of agony, also saw a young veiled lady, of a mischievous yet chaste loveliness, that is death, always "yearned for" and searched for, that opens The Leopard: Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

TURIN
Turin is apparently a secondary stop in Lampedusa's biographical itinerary. There are in fact very few important episodes connected with the Piedmontese regional capital: we know that Tomasi was in Turin on 5th May 1917 to attend a course for cadet officers, and that on 26th August he was appointed aspirant reserve second lieutenant. Turin therefore appears as one of the places more directly connected with Tomasi's military career: a notoriously fundamental experience in the Sicilian writer's life; he was also a careful scholar of strategy and he particularly studied Von Clausewitz.
However, Turin also left an important mark in Tomasi's literary works. In particular, all the first part of the short story Lighea reconstructs, with a light and almost satirical touch, the life of a young Sicilian journalist, immigrated to Turin, who copes with superficial love affairs and evenings spent in a spectral café reading a pile of newspapers, all alike, (as prescribed by Minculpop) found at the editorial office.
In this prologue we find more than one autobiographical element, although hidden behind the screen of a cutting irony with a tinge of misogyny (the draft of the two antagonist "totes" that join forces against the traitor lover) that prepares the reader for the denigration of the unreliability of southern people.
If Tomasi's antifascism - exclusively theoretic - is only hinted at through the implicit criticism of the regime's lack of information, Turin's somewhat provincial and tiresome air emerges more evidently through the quick draft of the visitors to the gloomy café, compared to Hades, where the old Greek scholar, who once loved a mermaid, passes his days. But it is rather a kindly form of criticism, which already allows us to guess, although veined with scepticism, the respect for the righteous Chevalley in The Leopard.

GENOA
For some time Giuseppe Tomasi remained an unfathomable and almost unknown writer and, as it were, character. His pupil Francesco Orlando, with his booklet " A Memory of Lampedusa" published in 1962, had shed a gleam of light on this atypical and solitary author. Among the inaccuracies that filled the first biographies of Tomasi, perfunctory and incomplete, we find the news, obviously false, that he took a degree in law and, according to Felini, even with excellent marks "with a dissertation that seemed partly a masterpiece of juridical insight and partly the offspring of an extravagant mind".
Tomasi, certainly endowed with both insight and extravagance, did enrol at the Faculty of Law in Rome in 1915, but he only took one examination. In January 1920 he moved to the University of Genoa, but never took any exams. Nor did he get better results later at the University of Palermo. However, his stay in Genoa was fruitful in other ways.
Between 1926 and 1927 he in fact published in the Genoese magazine "Le Opere e i Giorni" (Works and Days) three articles (Paul Morand, W. B. Yeats And The Irish Risorgimento, A Story On Caesar's Fame) which make up the bulk of his apprenticeship as an essay writer and critic.

San Pellegrino Terme
In the preface to the 1958 edition of The Leopard Giorgio Bassani tells of the first time he met Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
It was the summer of 1954 and at San Pellegrino Terme Giuseppe Rovagnani had organised a literary convention during which ten well-known Italian authors were to introduce ten debutants. Eugenio Montale was godfather to the poet Lucio Piccolo, by then an over fifty-year-old baron, but destined to be, in Bassani's words, "the true revelation of the convention".
An older cousin accompanied Piccolo, "a tall, stout and taciturn gentleman" whose face, pale and "greyish" already showed the marks of an incipient illness. This man, who had the slightly martial air of a "general at rest", "heavily" leaning on his stick as one who staggers because of an exhausting sickness, was obviously Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa. And his cousin's sudden success had obviously aroused in him an obscure and subtle illness: the desire to write. The more so, since he himself (and Sciascia immediately guessed so) had written the letter of presentation that accompanied the volume containing the nine poems that Piccolo had printed at Sant'Agata.
In San Pellegrino Terme Lampedusa therefore evidently felt his literary vocation spring, or spring again, in him, to emulate his cousin's success. But, by then, he only had very few years left, although he feverishly devoted them to writing.

Palermo
The Tomasi family reached Sicily in 1577 with Mario, a captain of arms from Capua, following the Viceroy Marcantonio Colonna. The family's actual settlement in Palermo did not take place until a century later, when Ferdinando died prematurely in 1672 and his son Giulio moved to the regional capital.
Already under the latter's successor, Ferdinando II, the Tomasi acquired great importance in Palermo. Three times town magistrate, Ferdinando used all the town administration's money to organise the feast in honour of Santa Rosalia, the patron saint.
We again find a Giuseppe Tomasi and Colonna still magistrate of Palermo, as well as administrator of Santa Lucia theatre, at the beginning of the XIX century. His son was that certain Giulio, fond of astronomical studies, who would partly inspire the character of Don Fabrizio in The Leopard.
The writer Giuseppe Tomasi was born in Palermo on 23rd December 1896. His birth was immediately saddened by a terrible loss: two weeks after he was born, his little sister Stefania, who was only two, died of diphtheria.
A destiny of solitude, which would become a true vocation, thus awaited Giuseppe. And his forefathers' house, the palace in Via Lampedusa, was to become his refuge. It is no chance that the Places of My Infancy are centred on the writer's two dearest dwellings, the one in Palermo and the summer one in Santa Margherita Belice, which arouse in him a feeling of love abandon.
Hence, the "places" of Giuseppe's childhood are homes and not towns. In his "biography in images" of his adoptive father Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi writes: "after being dismissed from military service Giuseppe remained away from Palermo as long as he could". However, after the friction between his wife and his mother, he didn't consider leaving the town; on the contrary he wrote to Licy, who had left for the Baltic, asking her to come back to Palermo.
As a matter of fact, after taking a diploma with a bias for classical studies at Liceo Garibaldi, Giuseppe travelled a lot, but he would never be able free himself completely of the double influence exerted by Palermo and by his mother.
When in Palermo, he led a secluded and almost dark life, though frequenting a few circles such as the Bellini, with its annexed film club, which gathered Palermo's aristocracy. His own home in Via Butera, which he bought in 1947, after the 1943 bombings had destroyed his native home, was a meeting place, where lessons and discussions took place, and which acted as an irradiating force to a significant part of the town's cultural life, thanks also to the presence of a pioneer psychoanalyst such as Licy was (suffice it to think of Francesco Corrao and Francesco Orlando).
The Leopard actually took shape on the tables of such cafés as Caflish and Mazzara, where Giuseppe was a regular visitor. His life was methodical and frugal, almost claustral. His only luxury were his books, which he bought at Flaccovio's, the editor bookshop, who fruitlessly acted as intermediary in the first attempt to publish The Leopard through Einaudi.
Palermo, like Sicily after all, was to Tomasi the object of an intense love and, at the same time, of equally strong contempt. But some pages of Places of My Infancy reveal the exceptionally azure brilliance of Palermo portrayed as radiant and almost capable of luminous spells, in strong contrast with the description of a "grim" town that we find in The Leopard.
Tomasi died in Rome with an unsatisfied wish to see his native town again; he was buried in Palermo, in the Cappuccini cemetery, on 28th July 1957, where his wife joined him on 22nd June 1982.

Santa Margherita Belice
The properties in Santa Margherita are linked to a branch of Tomasi's family on his mother's side; they were the Mastrogiovanni Tascas who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, had become related to the Lanza di Trabias obtaining, as explicitly included in the dowry agreement, the title of earls. Later, by marrying a woman of the Filangeri di Cutò family, Lucio Mastrogiovanni Tasca had acquired the feud of the barony of Misilindro, where Santa Margherita lay.
This place, that both Giuseppe Tomasi and his mother loved dearly, was therefore the outcome of a careful matrimonial policy, which had allowed a family of entrepreneurs to enter the exclusive, but forever needing new capital, world of Sicilian aristocracy.
Among the "country mansions", the one in Santa Margherita was Giuseppe Tomasi's favourite, ever since he was a child. It had been first built in 1680, but in 1810 the prince of Cutò had it totally rebuilt to make it worthy of giving hospitality to Ferdinando IV, who had fled from Naples, during Murat's reign.
A fundamental part of the attraction that Giuseppe felt for this distant home as a little boy was due to the adventurous charm of the journey there, partly by train and partly by carriage, interminable (over 12 hours) and perhaps even dangerous, if we consider that three carabinieri on horseback would join the convoy's escort at Partanna.
The huge house - with its three hundred rooms, three courtyards, guest quarters, stables, stores, big garden and orchard - was "a kind of Vatican" in whose desolation one could move around freely and safely as if in an "enchanted wood", devoid of dragons, but rich in graceful wonders. Its boundless extension, "full of jocund snares", was thus the ideal place for a boy in search of fantasising solitude.
In this magical dwelling, compared to "a sort of eighteenth century Pompeii", the young Giuseppe experienced the unforgettable shock of the killing of two robins during a lesson in gun shooting by a pitiless tenant.
But, among the places of his infancy, Santa Margherita has a central role above all because it was there that, when he was eight, Tomasi learnt to read thanks to the brisk lessons given him by Donna Carmela, a humble but extremely effective farmer teacher, while his mother taught him to write in French.
Hardly frequented - also because of the family's bad relationship with the local authorities, the parish priest in particular - the town is rarely and only indirectly hinted at by Tomasi. Some pages of his Memoirs are instead dedicated, though briefly, to the surroundings: the vineyards, the landscape spreading like "a huge squatting beast", the walk to Montevago and the one to Misilbesi, in a violent, sunny and "rogue looking" environment, the Venaria, where the shooting lodge was, the destination of gastronomic, not to say Pantagruelian, trips.

Palma di Montechiaro
The foundation of Palma is surrounded by a sort of mythical aura. Mario Tomasi, a gentleman from Capua, the first of his family to settle in Sicily, married Francesca Caro in 1583, and through this marriage, which related him to a powerful Catalan seafaring family, acquired the barony of Montechairo.
In this territory, his grandchildren Carlo and Giulio, who were twins, decided to create the town of Palma in 1637. The following year Fillippo IV made Carlo Duke of Palma, since he had been born second. Carlo, however, took orders and therefore left the feud and the title to his brother. Known as the "Saint Duke", Giulio transformed his palace into a Benedictine monastery, where his four daughters, as well as his wife Rosalia Traina retired through the years, thanks to a papal dispensation.
The men in the family did not prove less pious: his eldest son Giuseppe became a Theatine clergyman, he devoted himself to philological studies, he became cardinal and was finally beatified by pope Pius VII and canonised by pope John Paul II. Finally, the "Saint Duke" himself, who had in the meanwhile become prince of Lampedusa, retired to an enclosed life.
Palma di Montechiaro therefore had a sacred origin and it long remained deeply linked to the hagiography of the saint Tomasis.
The place of origin of the Sicilian lineage, Palma remained inexplicably unknown to Giuseppe Tomasi for almost all his life. The writer, in fact, only went there for the first time in 1955, just a couple of years before dying, and he very briefly noted in his diary with the date 4th September: "Fine weather. Siculiana. Mass. Set off by car at 3 p.m. with Agnello and Giò. Castle of Montechiaro, huge photographies. Then to the cathedral with visit to the dean. Lemon ices in the vestry. I was introduced to the crowds. Then, visit to the lovely Benedictine convent: joyful and kind welcome. The nice Abbess presented me with a birthday cake and I was offered jasmine. Moved".
Giuseppe Tomasi went back to Palma on 10th October of the same year. This was a particularly dense moment in his life in which he developed two dreams, becoming a father and writing. The rediscovery of his roots and of the diversity of his descent, so rigorously vowed to a privileged relationship with God, certainly played an unsettling effect on the conscience of the man and of the intellectual. "Palma - Giioacchino Lanza tomasi writes -, this small Sicilian Lhasa, struck the writer deeply, and prompted the final considerations of the pages in which the protagonist of The Leopard prepares himself to court death". The novel, that he had temporarily interrupted to devote himself to his autobiographical memories, was taken up again with alacrity just after the visits to Palma, as if the return to his origins had stirred up in him a somewhat religious longing for death and, together with it, a strong will to survive through literature.

Augusta
In autumn 1916 Tomasi, who was then an artillery lance corporal, was sent to Augusta where he spent three months before leaving for the front and facing the war and his own imprisonment.
There he rediscovered the pleasure of enjoying his friends' company, of discussing literary matters as well as of contemplating the beauties of nature. During his stay in Augusta, he became acquainted with Lieu-Tennant Enrico Cardile, with whom he shared a sensitive nature as well as a common interest for literature.
Tomasi and his friend spent their free time in Augusta strolling and taking boat trips, enjoying the limpid gulf water. A place in particular attracted Tomasi's attention…" … that little inner bay byond Punta Izzo, behind the hill overlooking the salt pans. … it's the loveliest spot in Sicily, … A wild bit of coast, … Utterly deserted not a house in sight; tha sea is peacock-coloured; and right opposite, byond the iridescent waves, Etna. From nowhere else as from there is it so lovely, so calm, masterful, truly divine. It is one of those places in wich one sees an eternal aspect of that island of ours wich so idiotically turned its back on its vocation, that of serving as pasturage for the herds of the sun."
We are not aware if the story of the mermaid was conceived during one of these walks, in a time when Tomas had just finished his classical studies, but the fact is that forty years later, those places, caught in his memory, were to become the setting for the delicate story of the mermaid Lighea, the writer's last short story.

Capo d'Orlando
During his life Giuseppe spent a lot of time at Capo d'Orlando, staying at his beloved Piccolo cousins' house. Already in the thirties, because of a financial crisis, the Piccolo family had retired to the family villa at Capo d'Orlando. The villa had a delightful position overlooking the sea and the Aeolian Islands right opposite the isle of Salina, which in the literary transposition of The Leopard was to take the place of Lampedusa, the island linked to his family's history. To the writer Villa Piccolo, with its special atmosphere, always meant a place where he could take refuge and escape from the problems of Palermo to recover the memories of a happy childhood spent with his dearest relatives and especially with his cousin Lucio with whom he enjoyed competing in quotations and literary discussions.