The Leopard

 

Several years ago, when I was still in Tennessee, I read The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) a wondefrul novel by Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa, which chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento that resulted in Sicily becoming part of the newly unified kingdom of Italy. The author was the last in a line of minor Sicilian princes, and he based the novel on his great-grandfather, Prince Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi. Published in 1958, it became one of the top-selling novels in Italian history and is regarded as one of the more important novels in modern Italian literature.  Lampedusa's elegy to fading Sicilian aristocracy has sometimes been compared to Gone With the Wind, in its intimate, familial portrayal of a certain type of society doomed to give way to modernity, in this case in the form of the unified kingdom of Italy in the 1860s. In 1963, the novel was made into a film, which I have not seen. Now, however, it has reappeared as a series on Netflix.

Probably the book's most memorable sentence is “For things to remain the same, everything must change.” The story, both in the book and in the Netflix series is ultimately all about the process of socio-political change (in this case Italian unification), who benefits (and who doesn't), and the toll the process takes on everyone, both those who adhere to the old and those who fight for the new.

Like the novel, the Netflix series starts in 1860 with Garibaldi's Redshirts invading Sicily to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy and (eventually) unite Sicily and southern Italy with the northern Italian Piedmontese kingdom of Sardinia ruled by Vittorio Emmanuele II, who in 1861 will be proclaimed king of a united Italy (which at that point still lacked Austrian ruled Venice and papal ruled Rome). The series alludes to these political events and their consequences, but it is mainly their consequences as experienced by a small group of central characters centered around Don Fabrizio Cordera, Prince of Salina, his wife and children, most especially his daughter Concetta, his favored nephew Tancredi, who fights for Garibaldi and then becomes an official in the Turin government,  and is at various time sin love with Concetta, but marries thr mayor's rich and ambitious daughter Angelica. 

The series compresses the story, which in the book ends with Concetta's retrospectives as an old woman in 1910. In the Netflix series everything (including Concetta's later recollections) takes place in real time in the early 1860s. It ends with the Prince's death, which effectively symbolizes the end of the old society although aspects of it (including the family's continued rule over its lands) do continue even under the new regime.

The series deftly combines the social and political changes the Prince and his fellow Sicilians are forced to adapt to with more personal familial crises which transcend the immediacy of politics. The three-way love entanglement of Tancredi, Angelica, and Concetta is simultaneously a time transcending familial crisis of love, affection, and loyalty, as well as also a parable of the changing mix of confusing affections and loyalties that accompany social and political change.

All this Netflix does in the most visually beautiful and engaging manner. One feels as well as sees the beauty of the Sicilian landscape, the grandeur of the life stye of its aristocracy, the increasing tensions in society and Church, and the growing attractiveness of the new Italy. The Netflix version of The Leopard combines the book's timeless love story and historically specific social and political conflicts with a gorgeous sensate display that effectively reflects Sicily's natural beauty and its historical problematic of attraction and repulsion.

Photo: Cover of the first Italian edition of the book (1958).