Book 1: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958)

"The Leopard" is considered one of the greatest Italian novels of the 20th century, or maybe, to hear people talk, of all time. The fact that I had never heard of it is the main reason I'm on this reading adventure: shame, basically.

And needing to know what all the fuss is about.

Another reason is booze. What brought me to the Wikipedia page of the author of "The Leopard" is one of those online serendipities where one interesting link leads to an even more interesting link to another and so on, until the object of your original search is all but forgotten. In this case, I was reading about cocktails and saw a reference to Strega, an Italian liqueur made with saffron. So I clicked on that and saw that Strega is also the name of the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. So I clicked on that and saw a reference to one of the winners of the Strega Prize: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian prince and author of a single book, "The Leopard."

A prince. A solitary book. If that weren't sufficiently romantic, said book, I learned, was rejected as "unpublishable" during the prince's lifetime but was (with tragic predictability) published after his death and became the best-selling novel in Italian history.

I ordered it.

I still haven't found Strega the liqueur.

But I've now read "The Leopard." My favorite thing about it is that it's a novel written in the 1950s about events in the mid-19th century, but it doesn't feel forced and anachronistic as so many historical novels do where the narrative voice simply doesn't match the time period. This voice feels authentic, like the author himself had lived through the 1860s rather than just imagined them. Perhaps that's because the main character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, is himself a Sicilian prince like the author.

The book takes place during the unification of Italy, known as the Risorgimento, when the various Papal States were united to form the single modern nation. The revolution spells the end of the rigid class system, but it also gives rise to the crass greed and vulgarity of the new capitalists who assume power.

My favorite scene is when Don Fabrizio, resigning himself to the new world order, has some members of the merchant class to lunch. He deliberately dresses down — a gracious gesture meant to spare his "inferiors," not used to dining with nobility, the embarrassment of not having the right clothes. Alas, the most annoying of these merchants, "rising" to his new station in life, dons a gaudy, ill-fitting suit of tails, effectively outdressing, but not outclassing, his host. It's the perfect metaphor for New Money and the failure to understand that the essential quality of Aristocracy, the one worth pursuing, is graciousness, not wealth.

My second favorite scene is when Don Fabrizio is hunting — lazily picnicking, really! — with his servant in a grove of cork trees (cork trees! for which Sicily is rather famous, apparently), and the conversation they have, man to man, reveals so much about their new destinies and regrets. The servant is fearful of the new democracy, so prone to abuse, and the power-hungry new capitalists. And that's a place where one realizes this novel, far from being an apology for aristocratic rule, is being written just after the horrors of Mussolini.

Another place where one is sucked into the modern era, this time overtly, is when the aging Don Fabrizio is wandering through an ancient, beautiful palace. The narrator writes:

"From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943."

It's an amazing tonal shift in the book. And startling. I read that the author began writing "The Leopard" as a way to deal with his depression after the Allies bombed and looted his own family estate. It's like he couldn't help but observe, in his 19th century tale, as an aside, or maybe even as the main point, that the future, if you only knew, is not to be imagined.

Also of interest, "The Leopard" was turned into a Burt Lancaster movie in 1963. Should be entertaining. Burt Lancaster doesn't come immediately to mind as the Italian aristocrat and amateur astronomer Don Fabrizio, but I'll give it a try.

And here's an interesting slideshow I found on the New York Times website called "Lampedusa's Sicily."

And a story called "Sicily Through the Eyes of the Leopard."