Everything about Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa totally explained
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (
December 23 1896 -
July 23 1957), was a
Sicilian writer. He is most famous for his only
novel,
Il Gattopardo (first published posthumously in 1958, translated as
The Leopard) 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."
Biography
Youth
Tomasi was born at
Palermo 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. It was during this time that he first drafted in his mind the ideas for his future novel
The Leopard. Originally his plan was to have the entire novel occur over the course of one day, similar to the famous modernist novel by
James Joyce,
Ulysses.
A wife from Latvia
In
Riga,
Latvia, in 1932, he married Alexandra Wolff Stomersee, nicknamed "Licy", a student of
psychoanalysis from a noble family of
German origin. 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's 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 in
Rome. He is buried in the
Capuchin cemetery at Palermo after a
requiem in the
Basilica del Sacro Cuore di Gesu in Rome. 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 20th century Italian literature.
Works
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 title is rendered in English as "The Leopard", but the Italian word
gattopardo refers to the American
ocelot or to the African
serval.
Il gattopardo may be a reference to a wildcat that was hunted to extinction in Italy in the mid-1800s—just as Don Fabrizio was dryly contemplating the decline and indolence of the Sicilian aristocracy.
The novel was often criticised by literary critics for "combining
realism with
decadent aesthetics". However, it became so popular among common readers, 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 sixteenth-century French literature, first published 1970). He also wrote "Joy and the Law", a common piece of literature studied in high schools today. He also wrote a small number of essays.
Further Information
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