Il gattopardo

Il gattopardo may refer to:

  • The Leopard, a novel
  • The Leopard (1963 film), a film based on the novel

  • The Leopard

    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. 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. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels".

    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.

    The author

    Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily, and he had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa. After the Lampedusa palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it.

    The Leopard (1963 film)

    The Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo, "The Serval"; alternate title: Le Guépard) is a 1963 Italian film by director Luchino Visconti, based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel of the same name.

    Plot

    Sicily, 1860. The corpse of a Royalist soldier is found in the garden of the villa of Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina (the gardener quips that these soldiers stink as much in death as they do in life). As the Prince's large family enjoys the customary comforts and privileges of an ancient and noble name, including private services with their Jesuit priest, war has broken out between the King's army and the insurgent volunteer redshirts of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Among the rebels is the Prince's remarkably handsome and dashing nephew, Tancredi, with whose romantic politics the Prince shares some whimsical sympathy (and a good deal of material support—Tancredi is a notorious spendthrift).

    Moved by the political uprising, the Prince departs, with his priest as cover, for a nearby town where he engages in an assignation with a local woman; he complains that, despite siring seven children upon his devout Catholic wife, he has yet to see her navel. Garibaldi's army conquers the city and Sicily from the Bourbons, but the mood is muted and the prospects murky. The Prince muses upon the inevitability of change, with the middle class displacing the hereditary ruling class while on the surface everything remains the same. His priest worries about the future of the church under the Garibaldini, but the Prince assures him that it is only his class who has anything to lose.

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    What The Leopard is really about

    The Spectator 16 Mar 2025
    Il Gattopardo – actually the word means ‘serval’, not ‘leopard’ – so named after the small wild cat on the family’s coat of arms – was the only book Tomasi, Prince of Salina, ever wrote ... Get Britain's best politics newsletters ... .
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    Celebrating the Italian Historical Drama ‘Il Gattopardo’ Across the Globe (Netflix Inc)

    Public Technologies 14 Mar 2025
    To celebrate the highly anticipated debut of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) , the new limited series based on arguably one of the greatest Italian novels of all time, Netflix brought a taste of Italy to six other countries around the world.
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