The Leopard

The Leopard is a 1958 historical novel by Italian writer and Sicilian Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Set during the period of Italian unification called the Risorgimento, the story concerns some of the political and social transformations that took place between the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the naming of Rome as Italy’s capital in 1871. Di Lampedusa tells this story through the struggles of the fictional royal House of Salina; in particular, Prince Fabrizio di Salina, who clings desperately to his family’s dying power. The Leopard is widely considered one of the foremost works of modern Italian literature and is often ranked as one of the best historical novels ever written.

The Leopard begins amidst the dissolution of Salina, an island country on the Italian peninsula. The House of Salina, like the royal houses of all of the small Italian countries about to be subsumed into a single Kingdom of Italy, is about to be dismantled. Prince Fabrizio di Salina is bitterly aware of his royal family’s impending ruin. The prince is characterized as large and quick to anger. One day, he walks around his estate and remembers seeing a soldier dying in the garden. He discounts the death as pointless since the whole kingdom has accepted that Sicily will not successfully resist the encroaching Italian forces. He decides to distract himself by traveling to the town of Palermo to spend some time with his mistress.

A group of Italian soldiers disembarks in Sicily, forcing the Salinas to escape town. They travel to Donnafugata, where they have an estate in the country. Tancredi di Salina, Fabrizio’s nephew, becomes infatuated with Angelica, the daughter of the mayor of Donnafugata. He proposes to her, and she accepts. As the family sustains its willful ignorance about the ongoing takeover of the island, the Italian army effectively gains control of Sicily. They stage a rigged public election and announce when the votes are “tallied,” that Sicilians have voted in overwhelming favor of Italian unification.



In vivid detail, di Lampedusa describes the sexual and romantic relationship that blossoms between the young Angelica and Tancredi. They wander together between the many rooms of the Salinas’s country house, kissing and professing their love for each other. Di Lampedusa makes it ambiguous whether they consummate their relationship before their marriage. Elsewhere in the house, a foreign diplomat appears, delivering a proposition that Prince Fabrizio becomes a senator when the United Kingdom of Italy is formally created. Fabrizio rejects the offer, viewing life as a politician as too different from his prior noble life.

Meanwhile, a friend of the royal family, Father Pirrone, leaves Donnafugata for his home village. He becomes entangled in a plot to convince his nephew to marry his niece in time to legitimize the child the two are expecting. He tells them that it is crucial to preserve their dignity through the institution of marriage, and they agree to marry. The Salinas go to a ball at the home of a fellow aristocrat, still trying to simulate their lost nobility. There, Tancredi and Angelica announce for the first time that they intend to marry. The party fawns over Angelica’s extreme beauty. Prince Fabrizio, on the other hand, overwhelmed and distraught about his fading legacy, has an existential crisis.

The end of the novel takes place sixteen years after Salina is absorbed into the United Kingdom of Italy. Having lived a long but sad life, Prince Fabrizio is now on his deathbed, having failed to move on from his lost status. Just as he is about to die, a beautiful woman resembling an angel appears next to his bed. Seeing her, he senses that death will be a great reprieve from the suffering he endured in life. After he dies, the story turns to his daughters. Now old women, they live together on the land that was once their inherited country. A religious minister visits their house and rids their chapel of an abundance of artifacts and other items. Fabrizio’s daughter, Concetta, looks out her window and imagines that she sees a leopard, the family symbol of the Salina dynasty. In reality, the leopard is a stuffed animal being thrown out of the chapel and into the trash. The novel’s ambivalent, symbolic ending suggests that the family’s delusion is incurable, but reaches no value judgment about whether Salina or Italy would have been the right country to prevail at the end of things.