Rating: 
Summary: Wonderfully evocative book
Review: When I was younger, my grandfather used to talk about how he had once met the Duke of Palma, a wonderfully enigmatic and eccentric old man at one of his uncles parties when he was visiting Roma. This book is part of my family lore, my mothers grandmother came from a family not dissimilar to di Lampedusa's (in a similar fashion her family's main palazzo in Palermo was bombed by the Americans, and all that the family now possess is a few villas along the coast near noto and ragusa), and it tells the story of these wonderful people. The scene where the Prince explains his reasons for not becoming a Senator, for me, sum up the Sicilian and who he represents. Oh, I know that the average person these days considers Sicilianos to be mafiosi, but that is a misguded and tragic view. Whilst I myself am Anglo-French, I still consider my Calabrese-Siciliano blood to be an integral part of me and love that part of the world. The Leopard is a must for anyone with a passing interest in Sicily and it sadddens me to see that some people find it too hard and not a good read. I thoroughly recommend the book in both English and even better if you can, in Italian. It sums up this wonderful island which has played such a crucial role in the history of the mediteranean and the lore of my own family.Whilst it is true that Peter Robbs book is an interesting read (and the man himself is even more interesting) nothing can quite compare to the words of Tomasi di Lampedusa. If one has been fortunate enough to smell the coffee and soil of la terra di Sicilia then one will love this book and feel the zest of the isle. It tells a story set in a wonderful period (when the prince meets the last Bourbon of the Two-Sicilies one can feel the heavy steps at caserta, similarly my family were closley aligned to this foreign and generally incompetent dynasty, thank god for the Savoys), and really captures the Risorgiomento. What more can I say, except a wonderful read.From a descendent of Alberto di Catania della Fiori, I salute Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, another great of the literati della sicilia. Viva Sicilia
Rating:
Summary: A moving novel of the decay of the Italian aristocracy
Review: _The Leopard_ is a very famous novel, published in 1958, one year after the author's death. It is di Lampedusa's only novel. It is really outstanding: I loved it, it's beautifully written, the central character is very charismatic, very well drawn, the story sad and honest. The subject is the Risorgimento, the unification movement of Italy in the early 1860's, and more particularly the effect of this
movement on the old Sicilian aristocracy as represented by one man, the Prince of Salina. It movingly depicts Salina's awareness of his, as it were, defunctness, and the necessary, unavoidable, but still to some extent regrettable extinction of the old aristocracy.
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