Il Gattopardo

“Il Gattopardo is a little more than a very beautiful book; it is one of the great novels of this century, one of the great novels of all time… the only Italian novel.” (Aragon, in Les Lettres françaises).

Apart from three short articles published in Genoa in the 1920s, Lampedusa had published nothing before this book, in this respect resembling two other great “posthumous” writers of the twentieth century, Fernando Pessoa and Franz Kafka. An admirer of Stendhal and Byron, Lampedusa began work on his novel at the end of 1954. In June 1955 he set it aside for other projects, then resumed writing in November 1955. He was thus nearly sixty years old when he wrote his masterpiece.

“Twenty-five years ago, he told me that he intended to write a historical novel, set in Sicily at the time of Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala, centered on the figure of his paternal great-grandfather, Giulio di Lampedusa, an astronomer,” recalled Madame de Lampedusa. “He thought about it constantly but could never bring himself to begin. Finally, having written the first pages, he pressed on with real ardor. He would go to work at the Circolo Bellini, leaving early in the morning and not returning until around three.” The man who records these words in his preface to the first edition was the true discoverer of Il Gattopardo and probably the most brilliant Italian editor of the twentieth century: Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000). It was Bassani who secured its publication with Feltrinelli after rejections from Mondadori and Einaudi. Bassani was a friend to everyone who mattered in Italy — Giorgio Morandi, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alberto Moravia — and was among the first to recognize the poetic talent of the young Pasolini. In his preface he describes how the manuscript reached him: “Shortly afterward I received the typescript. It bore no signature. Yet as soon as I had savored the delightful sentences of the opening, I was certain this was serious work, the work of a true writer. That was enough for me. A complete reading only confirmed my first impression. I telephoned Palermo at once, and learned that the author of the novel was none other than Giuseppe Tomasi, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa.”

The first edition of Il Gattopardo was published in Milan at the beginning of November 1958. Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, had died on 23 July of the previous year, of a malignant lung tumor discovered in April 1957. Lampedusa therefore never knew the posthumous fame of his novel, a success as sudden and rapid as his illness had been. From the moment of publication the book’s success was immediate: it won the Premio Strega in 1959, was translated into every language, and was adapted for the screen by Visconti in 1963.

Curiously, this landmark first edition of European literature remains one of the least documented of the twentieth century. Public libraries largely lack it. It is missing from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, from the 13 million volumes of the British Library, from the Pierpont Morgan Library, from the online catalogue of Yale University, from the New York Public Library, and, last but not least, from the Library of Congress. Most institutions hold only the 1959 reprint. The first edition is present at the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence by virtue of legal deposit.