Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (born Palermo, December 23 1896, died Rome, July 23 1957), was Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa. He is most famous for his only novel, Il Gattopardo (ISBN 880781028X, first published posthumously in 1958, translated as The Leopard, ISBN 0679731210) which is set in Sicily during the Risorgimento. A taciturn and solitary man, he passed a great deal of his time reading and meditating, and used to say of himself, "I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people."
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Youth
Tomasi was born to Giulio Maria Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, and Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca di Cutò. He became an only child after the death (from diphtheria) of his sister. He was very close to his mother, a strong personality who influenced him a great deal, especially because his father was rather cold and detached. As a child he studied in their grand house in Palermo with a tutor (including the subjects of literature and English), with his mother (who taught him French) and with a grandmother who read him the novels of Emilio Salgari. In the little theater of the house in Santa Margherita Belice, where he spent long vacations, he first saw a performance of Hamlet, performed by a company of travelling players.
In the army at Caporetto
Beginning in 1911, he attended the liceo classico in Roma and later in Palermo; he moved definitively to Rome in 1915 and enrolled in the faculty of Jurisprudence; however, that year he was drafted into the army, fought in the lost battle of Caporetto, and was taken prisoner by the Austrians. Held in a Hungarian POW camp, he managed to escape and return on foot to Italy. After being mustered out of the army as a lieutenant, he returned home to Sicily, alternately resting there and travelling with his mother, and continuing his studies of foreign literature.
A Latvian wife
In Riga, Latvia, in 1932, he married Alexandra Wolff Stomersee, nicknamed "Licy", a Latvian student of psychoanalysis from a noble family. They first lived with di Lampedusa's mother in Palermo, but soon the incompatibility between the two women drove Licy back to Latvia. In 1934 his father died and he inherited his princely title. He was briefly called back to arms in 1940, but, as head of a hereditary agricultural plantation, was soon sent back home to take care of its affairs. He and his mother ultimately took refuge in Capo d’Orlando, where he was reunited with Licy; they survived the war, but their palace in Palermo did not.
After his mother died in 1946, Tomasi returned to live with his wife in Palermo. In 1953 he began to spend time with a group of young intellectuals, one of whom was Gioacchino Lanza, with whom he developed such a strong rapport that, the following year, he legally adopted him.
The Leopard
Tomasi di Lampedusa was often the guest of his cousin, the poet Lucio Piccolo, with whom he travelled in 1954 to San Pellegrino Terme, to attend a literary awards ceremony, where he met, among others Eugenio Montale and Maria Bellonci; it is said that it was upon returning from this trip that he wrote Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), which he finished in 1956. During his lifetime, the novel was rejected by the publishers to whom it was presented, about which Tomasi was reportedly quite bitter.
In 1957 Tomasi di Lampedusa was diagnosed with lung cancer and died on July 23. (He is buried in the Capucin cemetery at Palermo.) His novel was only published two years after his death, when Elena Croce sent it to Giorgio Bassani who published it at the Feltrinelli publishing house. The following year, in 1959 the novel won the Premio Strega, and since that time it has had an unquestioned status as one of the great works of twentieth-century Italian literature.
Il Gattopardo follows the family of its title character, Sicilian nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, through the events of the Risorgimento. Perhaps the most memorable line in the book is spoken by Don Fabrizio's nephew, Tancredi, urging unsuccessfully that Don Fabrizio abandon his allegiance to the crumbling Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and ally himself with the Savoy dynasty: "Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they'll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
The novel was often criticised by literary critics for "combining realism with decadent aesthetics". However, it became so popular among common readers, so that in 1963 Il Gattopardo was made into a film, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster; Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale also appear in prominent roles.
Tomasi also wrote some lesser known works: I racconti (Stories, first published 1961), Le lezioni su Stendhal (Lessons on Stendahl, privately published in 1959, published in book form in 1977), and Invito alle lettere francesi del Cinquecento (Introduction to fifteenth-century French literature, first published 1970). He also wrote a small number of essays.
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