‘The Leopard’: novel into film
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian duke and prince, wanted to preserve in art his ancestral society that had almost disappeared. In The Leopard (1958) he uses the story of his own family background to show the social changes made by historical events and to make the Italian past come alive. His traditional novel has a densely textured and vividly realised 19th-century setting and cast of characters, but the satiric vision and elegiac tone belong to the modern age. Luchino Visconti’s recreation of the novel in his film of The Leopard (1963) brings the book’s setting, characters, action and rich textures to a wider audience, and translates Lampedusa’s descriptive power into visually dazzling images.
The action of The Leopard describes the effect on a Sicilian aristocrat and his family of the revolutionary movement (the Risorgimento) that marked the destruction of the old order by middle-class usurpers and led to the unification of Italy. In May 1860 General Giuseppe Garibaldi, who’d fought several guerrilla wars during his exile in South America, sailed from Genoa with a thousand red-shirted volunteers (I Mille), landed at Marsala in western Sicily and liberated the island from the reactionary rule of King Francis II in Naples. Garibaldi then marched up the coast, defeated the Bourbon army and handed over southern Italy to the liberal King Victor Emmanuel, who ruled in Turin and became monarch of the united country in 1861. The novel takes place in three separate periods with about 25 years between them: 1860: Garibaldi’s invasion; 1883: the death of the main character Prince Fabrizio Salina; and 1910: when the fifty-first anniversary of Italian unification reveals both the failures of the Risorgimento and the decadence of the Prince’s family.
The first sentence of The Leopard during the family prayers—Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae (“Now and at the hour of our death”)—is taken from the Hail Mary and expresses the dominant themes of the novel: aristocratic pride in a moment of decline, and the erosion and extinction of a noble fortune, fame and family. This sense of death hangs darkly over the ruined palaces, whose inhabitants foregather to congratulate themselves on still existing. The Prince strives to maintain a remote-from-reality existence that reminds him of death. Like most Sicilians he has a powerful longing for oblivion and reflects, “Where there’s death there’s hope.”
Prince Fabrizio is an arrogant, confident, sensual and authoritarian character who loves hunting, dogs and women. Generous, honourable and idle, he is too attached to the past to join the present and ignores the future. The Prince is ambivalent about the cataclysmic historical events. Aware of the revolution and too intelligent to resist the inevitable, he believes Garibaldi’s 1860 revolution is a dubious gift to Sicily, that the fatalistic island is incapable of change and that the revolution will not have a profound effect on that island. Fatalistic himself, he refuses to act and prevent the destruction of his class. An accomplished astronomer, whose wife is appropriately called Stella (“star”), he takes the long view and literally looks at the world sub specie aeternitatis (“under the aspect of eternity”). His evasion of reality, personal solitude and social isolation are all synthesised in his passion for astronomy.
Marcel Proust’s description of his dashing hero Robert de Saint-Loup in Remembrance of Things Past was a model for the Prince’s nephew Tancredi Falconeri in The Leopard. Proust writes, “Because of his ‘tone,’ because he had the insolent manner of a young ‘blood,’ above all because of his extraordinary good looks . . . they knew how virile he was and how passionately fond of women.” Tancredi, too, is energetic, brave, resourceful, charming and kind. The Prince loves the adventurous, hot-headed revolutionary Tancredi more than his own pallid sons, and though he disapproves of his nephew’s revolutionary ardour, he gives him a roll of gold pieces as a political gift when he sets off to join Garibaldi’s rebels.
In one of the great scenes in the novel and film, the beautiful Angelica, daughter of the rapacious Calogero Sedàra, makes her first appearance at the Prince’s lavish banquet that follows the successful invasion of Sicily. Tancredi then tells a salacious story of how he and his men, during the fighting in Palermo, forced their way into a closed convent:
We went in; not a soul in sight; but from a corner of the passage we heard desperate screams; a group of nuns had taken refuge in the chapel and were all crouching around the altar; I wonder what they feared in the hands of those dozen excited young men; they looked absurd, old and ugly in their black habits, with starting eyes, ready and prepared for martyrdom. They were whining like bitches. Tassoni, who’s a card, shouted, “Nothing doing, sisters, we’ve other things to think of; but we’ll be back when you’ve got some novices.”
When Tancredi tells Angelica, “Had you been there, Signorina, we’d have no need to wait for novices,” she laughs hilariously. The Prince’s daughter, the plain, prudish, deeply religious Concetta, is offended by the story, begins to weep and declares: “Tancredi, one tells nasty tales like that to a confessor, not to young ladies at table; anyway when I’m there.” At this crucial emotional turning point, Tancredi shifts his affection from Concetta to his passion for Angelica. The moment the two young women pass each other like meteors—one rising, the other sharply descending—is the most poignant in the book. Sacrificed by her father to political necessity, Concetta becomes like the nuns in the story: virginal, isolated and afraid.
Later on, as Tancredi pursues Angelica through the deserted attic rooms where his ancestor, the Saint-Duke, once scourged himself in the sight of God, their deliberate sexual delay intensifies their erotic desires. The mixture of passion and denial within a religious context, postponing their long-desired consummation until marriage, inspires the most emotionally intense scene in the novel and film.
The phenomenal appearance of Angelica rouses the carnal jealousy of the Prince. Tancredi’s passionate yet ultimately restrained courtship of the voluptuous maiden makes the Prince envy the opportunities open to their ancestors, who would have taken such girls by right and “rid themselves of urges to bed down with the Angelicas of their day without ever going before a priest, or giving a thought to the dowries of such local girls.”
The Prince imagines that Tancredi will become an ambassador and knows that if he marries the shy, homely and unsuitable Concetta, their marriage would be, like his own, sexually unsatisfactory and unhappy. He encourages Tancredi, a vicarious substitute, to marry the young beauty he loves and would himself have liked to seduce.
Angelica’s father, Calogero Sedàra, embodies the traditional folk tale scenario of an ugly father with a beautiful daughter. (The handsome Prince has a plain daughter.) With a strange indifference the Prince observes Tancredi join the Garibaldini, abandons his own daughter Concetta, who’s betrayed by both her father and her suitor. In order to retrieve a remnant of the family fortune, he allows his nephew to marry the beautiful peasant Angelica. Sedàra has taken advantage of the revolutionary chaos to complete his theft of the princely feudal lands, but the more Sedàra steals from the Prince, the more money there will be for Tancredi and Angelica. We admire the Prince’s values and share his disdain, but regret his easy surrender to the inferior standards of Sedàra.
In a striking contrast to Sedàra, Chevalier Chevalley comes all the way from Piedmont to Sicily to persuade the Prince to become a senator of the new government in Turin. Chevalley is idealistic and progressive; the Prince is realistic and pessimistic. He politely explains his refusal with a brief lesson in history:
The sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from the outside, none made by ourselves. . . . Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them. . . . Our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death. . . . The past attracts us only because it is dead.
With aristocratic disdain and ironic wit, the Prince tells Chevalley that the new senator should be Sedàra, who’s bribing his way to obtaining a noble but fake pedigree: “His family, I am told, is an old one or soon will be.”
The Prince expresses the theme of the novel—fading splendour and dying worlds—when he tells Chevalley, in a famous sentence: “We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who will take our place will be little jackals, hyenas.” In the novel’s most celebrated passage, Tancredi paradoxically insists, “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” The Prince agrees: “All will be the same though all will be changed.” The apparently revolutionary transformation will actually be superficial. Sicily, resolutely resistant to change, will always remain the same, no matter what happens.
The grand ball, peopled by the Prince’s decrepit past mistresses, reveals that he can no longer find pleasure in society. He retreats to the library where he’s strongly attracted to the melancholy scene in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Death of a Just Man (c.1788), that depicts a father on his deathbed, encompassed by a weeping family: “the old man was expiring on his bed, amid welters of clean linen, surrounded by afflicted grandsons and grandddaughters raising arms toward the ceiling. The girls were pretty, provoking, and the disorder of their clothes suggested sex more than sorrow. . . . The Prince asked himself if his own death would be like that.” He identifies with the dead father because he knows that he and his class are doomed and dying.
On the way home after the ball, the astronomer kneels on the street as a priest hurries by to give the Last Sacrament to a dying man: “At a crossroad he glimpsed the sky to the west, above the sea. There was Venus, wrapped in her turban of autumn mist. She was always faithful, always awaiting Don Fabrizio on his early morning outings, at Donnafugata before a shoot, and now after a ball. Don Fabrizio sighed. When would she decide to give him an appointment less ephemeral, in her own region of perennial certitude.”
Visconti and Lancaster behind the scenes
Visconti, director of the film version of The Leopard, was himself a Milanese count, born into an aristocratic milieu. The screenplay—written by Visconti and by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, the woman who wrote The Bicycle Thieves—remains close to the dialogue and to the most brilliant scenes of the novel, and conveys the rich flavour of the period. The film’s action is confined to 1860 to 1862 and eliminates the last 27 years from 1883 to 1910. The two weaknesses, in this superb 185-minutes of stunning landscapes, costumes and sets, are the unconvincing battle scenes in Palermo (not in the novel) and the excessively long 46-minute ballroom finale. The ball takes up a quarter of the film and effectively reveals, amid the splendour, the realistic chamber pots of human piss.
The handsome but wooden Gregory Peck and the indelibly Irish Spencer Tracy were absurd candidates for the leading role. Burt Lancaster as Prince Fabrizio, Alain Delon as Tancredi and Claudia Cardinale as Angelica are perfectly cast. The American Lancaster and the French Delon are convincingly Italian and expertly dubbed in that language. Lampedusa’s “trembling elderly man-servant” appears in the film as the aged, dutiful Mimi.The film is structured by the Prince’s personal encounters with all the main characters: Tancredi, the household priest Father Pirrone who has to accompany the Prince on a visit to his mistress, the base Sedàra, the noble Chevalley and the hunter-organist Ciccio Tumeo. The main scenes in the film are the daily recital of the Latin Rosary after which the wall paintings of pagan gods are revealed when the women rise from their prayers; the corpse of a dead Bourbon soldier rotting in the garden; the sudden arrival and swift departure of the irresistible, energetic Tancredi who leaps onto the departing carriage; the Prince’s fondness for his ideal son; the arduous heat-and-dust journey to their country estate at Donnafugata, which includes an uncomfortable night in a peasant’s hut; the formal reception; the lavish banquet; the dramatic entrance of the stunning Angelica, fresh from her convent education in Florence; Tancredi’s story of his men entering the convent, which amuses Angelica and appalls Concetta; Tancredi’s passionate erotic fugue with Angelica as they roam through the deserted rooms of the palace; the Prince’s meeting with the corrupt and loathsome Sedàra; the fraudulent plebiscite in which the town unanimously chooses to join the unification of Italy.
During their hunting trip Ciccio Tumeo tells the Prince about Sedàra’s peasant background and his own resolute (and disqualified) opposition to the plebiscite: “How foul, Excellency! It’s the end of the Falconeris, and of the Salinas too.” Tumeo says Angelica’s grandfather was called “Peppe ’Mmerda” (Shitty Joe) but “her sheets must smell like Paradise”. The magnificent film continues with Sedàra’s slow revelation of Angelica’s massive dowry; the Prince’s meeting with the Piedmontese Chevalley, who notes the abject poverty of the peasants that the upper-class Sicilians ignore; the Prince’s explanation of why he must refuse the offer to become a senator; the grand ball, filmed in a Palermo palace, which introduces Angelica to high society that is dazzled by her beauty; the Prince’s identification with Greuze’s Death of a Just Man; his elegant waltz with Angelica that reveals his powerful desire for the girl he holds in his arms; his support of Tancredi as his vicarious substitute; the Prince leaving the ball and seeing a priest hurrying to a dying man.
The film of The Leopard recreates a vanishing world at a major turning point in Italian history. It allows the viewers to visualise the splendid banquet and the painting by Greuze, the contrast between the squalid life of the peasants and the harsh beauty of the countryside. The film won the Palme d’Or, the highest honour, at the Cannes film festival in 1963. The influential critic Edmund Wilson noted that the film lacked the ironic tone
of the novel, but did justice to Lampedusa’s lavish descriptions of the food. He concluded that the Prince’s dance with Angelica “at the ball is one of the great scenes of the picture” and called it “one of the best that have ever been made”.
Jeffrey Meyers’ will publish Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway in November 2025 and The Biographer’s Quest in the spring of 2026.
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