On Sicilian summers & democratic decline

A beautiful book and the most stunning film ever made

Apr 06, 2025

Picture this: it’s a hot summer day and you’re sitting in the comfortable shade of a carriage, crossing through an orange grove; you smell leather, jasmine, and the faint scent of the horses carrying you towards your destination: your Sicilian palace, where you’re about to dine.

You’ll drink punch alla Romana before your meal and then dine on a timballo with a “burnished gold crust.” For dessert? Zabaione. And, naturally, plenty of marsala wine. As you eat, you’ll watch lace curtains rustle in the merciful breeze—the only respite from the stifling Sicilian heat, apart from your handcrafted lace fan—and let in light that illuminates the ceiling’s frescoes of Venus and her Olympic colleagues.

After that? A ball at a neighboring palace, where the air smells like chypre, wine, and vanilla. It begins at 10:30 p.m. You won’t be out of there until 6:00 a.m., but fear not, you’ll get as many visits to the well-appointed dessert table, where you’ll opt for a slice of Mont Blanc and a glass of champagne.

A charmingly evocative summer’s day, non?

Would you believe me if I told you I pulled all of these scenes directly from a deeply poignant novel about the interior life of a Sicilian aristocrat as he watches his family fade into irrelevance in the wake of the 1860 risorgmento of Italy?

I picked up The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa on a whim a few weeks ago. It had been languishing on my TBR for far too long; but a few instigating events pushed it forward: I read that both Sofia Coppola and Martin Scorsese had each cited Luchino Visconti’s adaption of the film as a strong influence on their work, and I also saw it was being re-released as a Netflix series.

So, I started the book. Yesterday, I finished it. Today, I watched the movie, and I’m four episodes into the show, which I’ve been watching for the past week.

I didn’t set out looking for a story that could serve as summer’s definitive novel, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the recent attention the book (which was rejected in the author’s lifetime before becoming the bestselling book in Italy, ever) enjoyed a resurgence brought about by the streaming giant.

Even if it doesn’t: I’m here to tell you that The Leopard needs to be your next read. And watch.

A story that both inspires feverish aesthetic obsession and provokes genuine, deep thought is rare. But, thanks to both the book and the film, here we are.

It’s 1860 and Don Fabrizio Corbera, The Prince of Salina, is sequestered in his Sicilian palace as Garibaldi’s army fights to claim Sicily (and Naples) in pursuit of a unified Italian nation.

We watch him accept the idea that his country will no longer stand alone and his name, one that once represented dignity and power, no longer means anything. He’s depressed about the situation, but the fight he puts up is purely internal, with monologues like this interspersing his moments of outward passivity throughout the book:

As he crossed the two rooms preceding the study, he tried to imagine himself as an imposing Leopard with smooth, scented skin preparing to tear a timid jackal to pieces; but by one of those involuntary associations of ideas which are the scourge of natures like his, he found flicking into his memory one of those French historical pictures in which Austrian marshals and generals, covered with plumes and decorations, are filing in surrender past an ironical Napoleon; they are more elegant, undoubtedly, but it is the squat little man in the gray topcoat who is the victor.

His resigned inner monologues are an allegory for a nation in decline that would rather die than assimilate. When he’s asked to be a Senator for the newly unified Italy, he refuses, insisting that—like his country—he is too steeped in the past to bring the country forward.

Sicily: the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than foreign dominations; this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous slackness and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live should be…this violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts, all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, whom we obeyed, then detested…all these things have formed our characters, thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.1

There’s no one better placed to tell this story than Di Lampedusa, a Sicilian aristocrat himself. Di Lampedusa wrote the story after the 1943 bombing of his family’s palace and based the character of the Prince on his own grandfather. His purpose with the novel? To understand the confluence of forces that pushed his family and his country into obscurity both in 1860 and again under Mussolini’s fascist regime.

In the wake of everything happening this week, some of it felt eerily topical:

Don Fabrizio felt a loathing for him; it was to the rise of this man and a hundred others like him, to their obscure intrigues and their tenacious greed and avarice, that was due the sense of death of which was now, obviously, hanging darkly over these palaces; it was because of him and his colleagues, their rancor and sense of inferiority…reminded [him] of crows veering to and fro above lost valleys in search of putrid prey.

But these are Italians we’re talking about, so The Leopard is far more than melancholy and darkness. It’s also a story about how life goes on, even when things around you fall apart: summer comes, parties go on, beautiful people fall in love while carelessly hurting others in the process, and you can do nothing but watch it happen. Regimes are ephemeral, but, especially to the Italians, love and beauty spring eternal.

This philosophy is best evidenced at the brutal love story at the center of the book: Don Fabrizio’s nephew, Tancredi, who fights for Garibaldi “for fun,” goes back on his verbal promise to marry his daughter Concetta when, Angelica, the more beautiful daughter of the garish but wealthy mayor, Don Calogero, shows up at a dinner party and laughs at one of his vulgar jokes. As the two of them dance the night away at a ball, and Don Fabrizio sits in the other room, staring at Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting The Death of an Old Man2 and contemplating whether his death will look similar (he concludes that the women surrounding him will be more modestly dressed and that his sheets will be dirtier), Angelica and Tancredi enter the room, exhausted from dancing.

*Death of an Old/Just Man via Meisterdrucke*

As they observe Don Fabrizio observing the picture, he notes:

the two young people looked at the picture with complete lack of interest. For both of them, death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed, of course, but it was something that happened to others.

Instantly bored and incapable of connecting to the fact that their happiness is anything but eternal, they convince Don Fabrizio to emerge from the study and return to the ball. He observes their youthful flippancy with the lucidity only available to someone past their prime:

[Tancredi and Angelica] were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor… Full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching…those murky ambitions obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was whispering in her ear, the scent of her hair, the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

It’s within passages like these, where Di Lampedusa places as much narrative weight on the concepts place and time3 as he does on the characters themselves, that make for a story both deeply atmospheric and ripe for visual retelling.

And this is where Visconti’s film comes in. There’s a quote on the BFI website from a man called John Baxter, who describes the essential difference between American and European cinema in one sentence: Europe has EYES.

And it is this breathtaking attention to detail that makes The Leopard one of the most visually stunning movies ever made.

The movie stars Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio, and if you’re confused, so was I, so let’s pause right there. The movie is dubbed, as most iconic Italian films are.

Dubbing in Italy is something of an art form, a function of Mussolini’s fascist regime. He decreed all Italian films needed to be shot silently, so the government could review them and ensure that whatever language was dubbed within was “politically acceptable.”

Typically, actors that didn’t speak Italian would speak their dialogue in English, and then it would get dubbed over by Italian actors. This is how one of Italy’s most beloved films ended up starring an American, a Frenchman (fluent in Italian, but with an accent deemed insufficient for filming in the language), a Tunisian-Italian (also fluent, but filmed in French for the same reasons), and a Brit, among a cast of supporting Italians.

Burt Lancaster is spectacular as the Prince, but Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale are particularly mesmerizing as the young lovers Tancredi and Angelica; they might be the most beautiful couple I’ve seen on screen (photos don’t do it justice, you need to watch them in motion to grasp their chemistry).

Also: apparently, Alain Delon had a lifelong crush on Cardinale, but she rejected him, and they remained best friends. She says he used to call him and say that “even though their romance was only on screen, that meant it would last forever.” Imagine being the-one-that-got-away-from-Alain-Delon. LEGENDS ONLY.

Anyway, the movie’s visual feast goes far beyond the gorgeous actors. Visconti, a nobleman himself (albeit of Milanese, not Sicilian descent—a notably vast difference), did everything he could to evoke the sensibilities of the period. Lancaster spoke of a time when he opened a drawer in the Prince’s bedroom—one that would never be in view of the camera—to find a number of sumptuous silk shirts. He asked if the camera would be shooting them, and Visconti confirmed they were for his eyes only. “You are the Prince,” Visconti apparently said. “They are for you to touch.” Similarly, Claudia Cardinale opened a small bag she’d been carrying to find that Visconti had placed a period-appropriate perfume inside, without even telling her.

And the details the camera does see are as stunning as expected. The gentle ruffle of a lace curtain, the camera light hitting a cherub on a fresco, the dramatic rites of an Italian Catholic mass, and, of course, the famous 45-minute final scene where the family attends a ball. As a viewer, you’re so steeped in it, you feel like you’re there, and you understand what it means when Angelica offers Don Fabrizio a final waltz—one final flash of grandeur before he heads home alone and accepts the inevitable4.

Another thing I adored about the movie—on a more superficial level—was the clothing. I’ve watched so many period pieces set in England where the clothes are a heavier taffeta and the necklines are more old-fashioned. The 1860s Sicilian women had heat to contend with! They all wore cotton, off-the-shoulder dresses to balls, accessorized with gorgeous choker necklaces, and cooled themselves off with lace fans.

*girls at the ball in Il Gattopardo,* via gogsmite.

Naturally, I’m seeking out some of my own Leopard-inspired looks for summer. The best resource I’ve found so far is Couper, purveyors of some truly stunning off-the-shoulder dresses I may be able to justify in the wake of my newfound love for this film. This Gul Hurgel piece evokes Don Fabrizio’s serious-and-hapless daughter, Concetta (didn’t have time to talk about her, but she’s a fascinating literary character); this Rosewater House dress is very Angelica (who whispers in Concetta’s ear that she’s wearing pale green to the next ball); and this dress, from No Pise la Granna is hardly formal event appropriate, but looks perfect for swanning around a Sicilian palace in, if that’s in your summer plans (it will be once you watch). Pair any of them with a necklace of Vivienne Westwood pearls and a Lorna Murray hat (we’re using these to stand in for the bonnets they wear when they travel), and top it all off with a perfume (Himistu Violets for day; Jade Vines for the ball) and your Sicilian summer is set.

Literally Obsessed

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