Tomasi di Lampedusa
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957) - pronounced ju-SEP-i to-MAHZ-i di lam-pe-DOOZ-a, IPA: /dzu:'sɛppe to'mɑːzi di lampɛ'du:za/ - was an Italian writer, famous for his novel Il gattopardo (The Leopard), which was published posthumously in 1958 and made into a film of the same title in 1963 by the Italian director Luchino Visconti.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was born in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, into an aristocratic Sicilian family: his father was the tenth Prince of Lampedusa and on his father's death in 1934 Giuseppe succeeded to the title. He was at first educated privately in Palermo but at the age of 15 moved to Rome and attended a liceo classico (a secondary school with a programme of studies strongly biassed towards the study of Latin and Greek). In 1915 he became a law student at Rome University, but his university education was interrupted by service in the Italian army during the First World War. On his discharge from the army he went back to Palermo and, being free by reason of his great wealth from any necessity to earn a living, he devoted the rest of his life to travel and the study of literature. He wrote many essays on literary subjects, and in particular on French literature, but Il gattopardo was his only novel. Although the idea for the novel had come to him many years earlier, di Lampedusa did not actually start writing it until 1954. On its completion in 1956 the novel was rejected by two leading Italian publishing firms, Mondadori and Einaudi, and was still unpublished at the time of di Lampedusa's death in 1957. In the following year, however, the writer Giorgio Bassani, an editorial director at the publishing firm of Feltrinelli, accepted the novel for publication, and it has subsequently been recognised as one of the classics of modern Italian literature.
Il gattopardo is an historical novel set in Sicily at the time of the Risorgimento, i.e., the nineteenth century movement whose aim was Italian unification - an aim realised in 1870 with the establishment of Italy as a single nation under the Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel II. The events in Il gattopardo take place in 1860 when Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great Italian general, at the head of an army of 1000 volunteers (I mille, 'The Thousand') has landed in Sicily to support a popular uprising and conquer the island for the Piedmontese king. (Sicily at this time was still ruled by the Bourbon king, Francis II, from his capital in Naples.) Di Lampedusa's novel focusses on the imaginary figure of Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat and land-owner - the gattopardo of the novel's title - as he reflects how he can best respond to Garibaldi's military successes on the island and protect his own traditional position of authority and privilege.
