The Last Leopard E-Book

David Gilmour

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

In 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi, the last Prince of the Sicilian Lampedusa family, died impoverished and unknown, leaving behind the manuscript of a book he had recently finished. The following year the book, The Leopard, was published in Italy and has since been widely translated and recognized as one of the great novels of the twentieth century. For over a quarter of a century, the reclusive man's papers were hidden from the public, until David Gilmour was befriended by Lampedusa's adopted son. From letters, diaries and notebooks, Gilmour has brought to life the unlikely character of this enigmatic genius, and his milieu in Sicily and Europe. The Last Leopard is a fascinating meditation on what makes a writer and a masterpiece.

Leseprobe

The Last Leopard

A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

DAVID GILMOUR

Contents

Title Page

Note on Translations

Dedication

Family tree

Map

Foreword: In Search of Lampedusa

Foreword to the Fifth Edition

1 The Inheritance

2 A Sicilian Childhood

3 The War and Fascism

4 The Wanderer in England

5 A Baltic Marriage

6 The Troubles of Don Giuseppe

7 At Home in the Via Butera

8 The Consolation of Literature

9 The Reluctant Writer

10 Vocation and Commitment

11 Death and Redemption

12 The Solitude of Don Fabrizio

13 The Leopard’s Sicily

14 Il caso Lampedusa

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Plates

Copyright

Note on Translations

I am grateful to Collins Harvill for permission to quote from Archibald Colquhoun’s fine translations of The Leopard and Two Stories and a Memory. Occasionally I have amended them, partly because (in the case of the memoir) he was given an imperfect text to work from, and partly because he himself made a number of minor mistakes in his translation. All other quotations from Lampedusa’s published and unpublished works, his letters, diaries and other documents, have been translated by me. So have all the quotations from other people, except in the cases where reference is made to an English source in the notes.

To Gioacchino and Nicoletta

Genealogical Table of the Lampedusas

(Concentrating on those mentioned in the book)

FOREWORD

In Search of Lampedusa

IN THE COURTYARD of the Villa Lampedusa, a few miles from Palermo, Friesian cows pick their way carefully through the rubble. Their home is a wasteland of defunct objects: broken boxes, squashed petrol cans, a clutter of old bathtubs. The Villa itself is deserted, its broken shutters creaking with languor in the hot afternoon breeze. The façade is cracked and pockmarked, and the stucco has faded to a mild ochre; only the ceilings are intact, delicate, highly-wrought arrangements of fruit and flowers.

Most of the family homes recalled in the memoirs of Giuseppe Tomasi, last Prince of Lampedusa, are in similar stages of advanced ruin: the others have been destroyed altogether. The palace at Palma di Montechiaro, feudal base of the Lampedusas in southern Sicily, stands gaunt and derelict; their house at Torretta, in the hills west of Palermo, has been demolished and replaced by a monstrous orange school. The places of his mother’s family have fared no better: at Bagheria the Villa Cutò is now a squalid tenement forming part of the station yard. More dismal still is the state of the Palazzo Cutò at Santa Margherita, most beautiful of all the palaces and inspiration for Donnafugata in The Leopard. Stricken by an earthquake twenty years ago, its wreckage remains undisturbed, the courtyards filled with beams and ruined masonry, the palm trees knocked sideways, some of them half buried. The front slumps down one side of the town’s piazza, displaying broken balustrades and twisted balconies: all that remains of the internal decoration is a primitive fresco of the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome. Behind the devastation, the garden which Lampedusa described as ‘a paradise of parched scents’ has become a wilderness infested with giant thistles. In its integrity he described the house as ‘a kind of eighteenth-century Pompeii, all miraculously preserved intact’; in its desolation it symbolises the death of the Sicily to which he had belonged.

Biographers who travel ‘in the footsteps’ of their subjects invite delusions and disappointment: amid buildings decayed and gardens neglected, in once-peaceful places desecrated by highways and concrete, it is often difficult to imagine the inspiration of the writer or the poet. But if it is hard to conceive of nightingales in north London, it is harder still to picture the myrtles and fountains of Donnafugata. Sicily, wrote Lampedusa, is ‘the most destructive of countries’, over-burdened by a past for which it has little respect. Yet even he, disillusioned by his island and pessimistic of the future though he was, would have been surprised by the rapidity and extent of this decay.

In the course of a recent journey through Sicily I visited each of the Cutò and Lampedusa houses in turn. Amid all the other spectres of decadence, all the other evidence of feudal and island decline, one sight stood out in a special, abject category of its own. The old Palazzo Lampedusa in Palermo, birthplace and home of the prince, was destroyed in the American bombing of 1943: more than forty years later it was still there, in the heart of the old city, gutted and plundered; the ‘repugnant ruins’, which had so distressed its last owner, remained untouched. I tried to photograph the derelict outer wall, the only part visible from the street, but three carabinieri approached, shaking their heads and wagging their fingers. They were charming and polite, explaining that photography was forbidden in that area because of the proximity of the police station. It was useless to claim that my sole interest was the remains of the Palazzo Lampedusa: no one, they laughed incredulously, could be interested in a ruined wall.

As I retreated along the Via Lampedusa, I noticed a loose plank in the padlocked gates of the palace. The next day was Sunday and I rose before dawn, reached the building in the grey half-light, and squeezed through the gap in the gate. The front courtyard was full of rubble but I remembered the layout of the palace from Lampedusa’s memoirs and knew which way to climb. As the light improved I could recognise some of the rooms: his mother’s boudoir with its domed ceiling in gold and shades of blue, her dressing room overlooking the Oratory of Santa Zita, the place of Giuseppe’s earliest memory. Perhaps the most pathetic sight in the place was the wreck of the old library. Tattered shreds of green velvet lay among splinters of cornice and large chunks of plaster; from a pile of rusty chair springs stuck a faded parasol. Underneath the rubble, scattered pages of Lampedusa’s favourite authors mixed with the remains of his library catalogue, burnt and insect-eaten cards bearing the names of Shakespeare, Dickens and others. Buried among them, I found a number of more personal documents: photographs, ancestral correspondence, papers in his own handwriting, letters from his mother which testified to the closeness of their relationship.

It was after a visit to Sicily in 1985 that I decided to write a book about Lampedusa, but I had little idea then of the form it would eventually take. I had been to Palma di Montechiaro to see Andrea Vitello, a medical doctor who had been doing research on Lampedusa and his ancestors for many years, and had shown him my discoveries. I knew he was working on a biography, but I did not realise that the widowed Princess of Lampedusa had denied him access to all the material she had in her home in Palermo; nor did I realise, until I saw it later, how much documentary evidence of Lampedusa’s life had survived there.

I did not consider attempting a biography myself until after I met Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Lampedusa’s adopted son, during a visit to London at the beginning of 1987. I became a friend of him and his second wife Nicoletta, and they invited my wife and myself to stay at their home in Palermo, the house in Via Butera where Lampedusa had spent the last ten years of his life and in which his wife had lived out her widowhood. It is a commonplace for a writer to declare that ‘without the help of so-and so, this book could not have been written’, but in my case it is the exact truth. Without Gioacchino’s help I would never have come near to an understanding of Lampedusa. During the days he allowed me to search his house for documents; in the evenings he answered innumerable questions and told countless anecdotes. At breakfast he would direct me to a disused room and suggest I might find something in an old cupboard: I would go there, force it open with difficulty, and encounter a cascade of Lampedusa’s letters. One evening, after Gioacchino had gone to Rome, I went down to the basement and noticed an old cardboard box in a corner. Inside were documents which had not been seen since Lampedusa’s death: the diaries of his last years, the files of his time in the Red Cross, letters, unpublished essays, a commonplace book, some photograph albums of the 1920s. To take these upstairs to Lampedusa’s own library and work through them in the small hours was a memorable experience.

I stayed at the Via Butera at different periods during the summer and autumn of 1987, studying these and other documents, notably the thousand-page survey of English Literature which Lampedusa had written for a small group of pupils near the end of his life. Although I grew accustomed to his difficult handwriting, I would not have been able to decipher the most illegible passages without the help of Nicoletta Lanza Tomasi.

The hospitality of Gioacchino and Nicoletta also brought me into contact with other people who had known Lampedusa. I am particularly grateful to Giuseppe Biancheri, a nephew of the Princess of Lampedusa, who answered questions and sent me important material, including extracts from his grandmother’s diary and information on Lampedusa’s experience in the First World War. His brother Boris Biancheri, now Italian ambassador to London, was also very helpful, and I learnt much too from conversations with Francesco Agnello and with Vences and Giuseppe Lanza. Several other people have related personal memories of the prince including Derek Hill, Sir Steven Runciman, Giuseppe di Sarzana and Lady Hermione della Grazia; all of these have been extremely valuable. I am also grateful for the assistance, in different ways, of Giovanni Tadini, Andrea Vitello, Elizabetta and Bernard Giraud, Lotti and Franco Persico, Gaia Servadio, Geraldine Zalapi, Elisa di Cataldo, Caroline and Pierre de Cabarrus, and the custodian of the Fondazione Piccolo at Capo d’Orlando. I owe a special debt to Francesco Orlando, author of a beautiful memoir of Lampedusa, and to Caterina Cardona, the author of a study of the prince’s correspondence with his wife.

Denis Mack Smith, Christopher Duggan, Robert Swann, my father Ian Gilmour and other members of my family have read all or parts of the manuscript. I am grateful to each of them for many helpful suggestions.

Lastly I would like to thank Cristina Celestini, who checked all my translations, and Zelfa Hourani of Quartet Books, for her customary diligence and efficiency.

East Lothian, June 1988

Foreword to the Fifth Edition

Substantial new material about Lampedusa’s life has been discovered since I wrote the first edition of this book, some of it unearthed in unlikely places. One moving letter written by the prince as he was dying in 1957 was discovered nearly half a century later concealed in a book called The Adventures of Captain Cook. It had been addressed to his adopted son but by mistake was never sent.

Much of Alessandra di Lampedusa’s correspondence with her husband has emerged in recent years and illuminates some of the problems of their courtship and marriage. But the most spectacular find is a batch of letters Lampedusa wrote to his Piccolo cousins in the late 1920s, until now the decade of his life about which least was known. After being lost for many years, the correspondence was acquired by Senator Marcello Dell’Utri for his Fondazione Biblioteca di via Senato in Milan. Edited by Gioacchino Lanza and Salvatore Silvano Nigro, it was published by Mondadori in November 2006.

None of these discoveries has markedly changed my views on Lampedusa or the circumstances of his life, but all have added depth as well as details to the picture I had formed. I am thus enormously grateful for the opportunity to prepare a new edition of this book. As before, my principal debt is to Gioacchino Lanza, who now runs the San Carlo Opera House in Naples, and his wife Nicoletta: both in Naples and in correspondence they have clarified numerous obscurities in the fresh material. But I have also accumulated a new list of debts: to Marcello Dell’Utri and Stefano Colloca, who encouraged me to work on the Piccolo letters before they were published; to Gillon Aitken, my agent, who rescued the book from its early vicissitudes; to Gail Pirkis, James Daunt and Johnny de Falbe, who pressed for a new edition; and to Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson of Eland Books, who have so gracefully resurrected the work.

Edinburgh, January 2007

Our life is bounded by two silences: the silence of stars and that of graves.

Thomas Carlyle

(from the commonplace book of Giuseppe di Lampedusa)

1

The Inheritance

GIUSEPPE TOMASI was born in Palermo on 23 December 1896, son of the Duke of Palma and grandson of the Prince of Lampedusa. His father Don Giulio was one of five married brothers who between them managed to produce only three children, none of whom had offspring of their own. Two weeks after his birth, Giuseppe’s sister Stefania died of diphtheria at the age of two; many years later, the solitary first cousin on his father’s side died in his youth. On Giuseppe’s own death in 1957, the only surviving Lampedusa was his childless uncle Pietro.

The family’s extinction had been preceded by its economic ruin. Like many Sicilian aristocrats, the Lampedusas had been in financial difficulties since the abolition of feudalism in 1812 and subsequent changes in the system of primogeniture. These were greatly exacerbated towards the end of the century when Giuseppe’s great-grandfather, Prince Giulio, died of cholera in Florence, apparently without making a will. Disagreements between his nine children, followed by a series of legal disputes, led to a court order blocking the distribution of his property. When the division was finally made in 1945, long after all the original claimants were dead, the number of heirs had multiplied (through the female line) while the value of the estate had declined. Giuseppe’s share of the family patrimony was thus an insignificant fraction of his great-grandfather’s wealth.

Nearly all the later members of the Lampedusa family combined financial incompetence with a total lack of interest in even attempting to make money. Giuseppe’s uncle Pietro, who as Marquess of Torretta pursued a successful diplomatic career, used to boast that he was the first Lampedusa to work.1 He was also the last. It does not seem to have occurred to his brothers, or to his nephew Giuseppe, that they should earn a living, although their only alternative was an impoverished existence on the margins of aristocratic society. And even that life was made harsher for them by the uncharitable attitude of Giuseppe’s father: in Don Giulio’s eyes, his three youngest brothers had married so far beneath them that they could not be allowed to live in the Palazzo Lampedusa.*2

The destruction of the great house in Palermo during the Second World War, followed rapidly by the ruin or demolition of every other Lampedusa property in Sicily, was the dramatic culmination of the family’s decline. In The Leopard Giuseppe described his protagonist Don Fabrizio ‘watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it’. Yet Fabrizio did care, as did Giuseppe, about that inheritance, not because of what it brought in material benefits but because of what it represented in the form of tradition and family history. The decadence of the Lampedusas was resented by Giuseppe because it consigned his family to historical obscurity; but he did not attempt to halt it. On his deathbed Don Fabrizio reflects that ‘the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from other families’. Giuseppe di Lampedusa also had those memories: it was his need to preserve them, before they disappeared for ever, that compelled him to start writing in the last years of his life.

The origins of the Tomasi di Lampedusa are obscure and have not been clarified by genealogists eager to provide them with an exotic ancestry. Attempts have been made to trace the family back to the Emperor Titus, to a follower of Constantine, and to the sixth-century Byzantine emperor Tiberius. A modern historian of the family has produced a genealogical table based on heraldic evidence which he warns should not be taken too literally.4 According to this, the founder of the family was Thomaso ‘the Leopard’, commander of the Imperial Guard and husband of Tiberius’s daughter Irene, and the Tomasi are descendants of one of their sons who returned to Italy and settled in Ancona. Irene, however, is not mentioned in any Byzantine text and some of her descendants seem equally mythical. The genealogists refer to Peter as ‘sovereign count’ of Cyprus in the tenth century, when no such title existed, and to his father Basil as ‘sovereign baron’ of Lepanto, when again there was no such position and the place was a half-ruined village called Naupakton in a province overrun by Slav brigands. Some of the exploits of Thomaso’s other descendants also sound improbable: two brothers are alleged to have taken part in the First Crusade although their father had been born 120 years earlier.5

Little is known of the family’s existence in Ancona, but a branch seems to have remained there until the twelfth century when it moved to Tuscany. In Siena the Tomasi revealed that powerful and single-minded religious vocation which later made them famous in Sicily. One went to England as papal legate and tried to settle the dispute between Henry II and Thomas à Becket, while another became Bishop of Famagusta and Patriarch of Constantinople. From Siena a Ludovico Tomasi travelled south to Naples and it is from the branch he established at Capua that the family reached Sicily in the sixteenth century.6 In about 1580 Mario Tomasi, a military officer in Spanish service at Licata, married a local heiress who brought him the barony of Montechiaro, and over the following two generations the Tomasi established themselves as landed nobility on Sicily’s southern coast. In 1638 they became dukes of Palma, after a town they founded south east of Agrigento, and in 1667 princes of Lampedusa, a largely barren and usually deserted island nearer Africa than Sicily. Like the Tomasi families on the mainland, however, they retained a rampant leopard on their coat of arms and the motto Spes mea in Deo est. 7

The Lampedusas were not typical of the Sicilian nobility which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries formed one of the least distinguished aristocracies in Europe. The island’s Spanish rulers complained that the feudal lords were of no use either for the army or for public service and that they spent much of their time quarrelling over precedence or competing in fashionable extravagance. Yet they could keep the province under control for Spain if their vanity was sufficiently flattered by the concession of enough titles and privileges. In 1563 the first prince was created and by the end of the following century there were 102 princedoms in a population of about a million.8 There was little merit attached to these awards, most of which were sold to raise money for Spain, but the Lampedusas were evidently an exception. One of the family’s most notable characteristics in the seventeenth century was its aversion to traditional forms of vanity and worldly recognition.

A recurring hazard for the Lampedusas between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries was their near-extinction: in three generations their survival depended on the health of a single small child. This dearth of descendants can be ascribed largely to religious fervour. It was the custom in Sicily for younger sons and daughters to enter the Church, but in the Tomasi family the eldest boys were anxious to do so as well. This happened both in the Capuan branch, where in a single generation six out of eight children became priests or nuns, and in Sicily. In two consecutive generations at Palma the eldest sons renounced their titles and left them to brothers who also had religious ambitions. All the adult children of the first Prince of Lampedusa took holy orders except his youngest son Ferdinando. Yet even he wished to abandon the world after his wife died in childbirth, and he was planning to join the Capuchin monks at Milazzo when he died at the age of twenty-one.9

The first dukes of Palma were the twins Carlo and Giulio Tomasi, who founded the town in 1637. Shortly afterwards Carlo gave up his dukedom and became a distinguished theologian. Giulio, who extended the family’s estates through marriage and later became the first prince, was a more powerful religious figure. Known as the ‘saint-duke’, he turned his palace at Palma into a Benedictine convent and built himself a new one nearby. He also founded numerous churches as well as the cathedral, an impressive baroque building by Angelo Italia reached by a massive stone staircase from the main square.10 The saint-duke’s life was ascetic and bordering on the fanatical, a life devoted to prayer, looking after the poor, and daily bouts of self-inflicted flagellation. In The Leopard his descendant described the saint-duke: he ‘scourged himself alone, in sight of his God and his estates, and it must have seemed to him that the drops of his blood were about to rain down on the land and redeem it; in his holy exaltation it must have seemed that only through this expiatory baptism could that earth really become his, blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh …’

The most remarkable of the saint-duke’s daughters to enter the Benedictine convent at Palma was Isabella, who was officially venerated a century after her death by Pius VI. As the only game she enjoyed as a child was ‘playing nuns’, it was almost inevitable that she should enter the convent at an early age. Her life was as disciplined and self-critical as her father’s – like him she regularly lacerated herself with whips – but was further complicated by a lengthy campaign of torments and temptations by the devil. Once she described to her confessor how a rock hurled at her by the devil was warded off by St Catherine of Siena.11 Although plainly obsessed with her own problems, Isabella was nevertheless a talented woman and in her works, published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are echoes of the mysticism of St Teresa of Avila.

Isabella’s austerity and asceticism were shared by her brother Giuseppe, who renounced his titles and estates in order to pursue a career as a liturgical scholar. His reforms were aimed at simplifying the Roman breviary, removing its ‘liturgical embroideries’ and returning to the Scriptures. He was so obsessed by the need for austerity that, as a later admirer admitted, he ‘sacrificed nearly all that was picturesque and attractive in the old breviary … solely from a desire to return to antiquity’.12 In 1700 Giuseppe was one of four theologians who advised Clement XI that he would be committing a grievous sin unless he accepted his election as Pope. Twelve years later, Clement placed Giuseppe in a similar situation by making him a cardinal: the ascetic Tomasi, for whom religious titles were almost as unwelcome as noble ones, refused to accept until a papal order reminded him of the grievous sin he might commit. The following year he died and a process of canonisation was begun immediately, much encouraged, apparently, by the Jacobite Old Pretender and his mother, the former Queen Mary.13 The process, however, subsequently slowed down. Cardinal Tomasi was beatified in 1803 but did not become a saint until 1986.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, the writer-prince, was proud of being the descendant of ‘a family of ascetics and mystics’ and believed that this made him uncharacteristically ‘sympathetic to all fanatics’.14 But in the eighteenth century the Lampedusas lost some of their religious vigour and moved to Palermo to play more administrative roles under the Bourbon regime. Although several members of the family entered the Church, they do not seem to have had that spiritual intensity which characterised ‘the race of saints’ from Palma. The dominant figure of the period, and indeed the most powerful member the dynasty produced, was Prince Ferdinando II. A learned man and a patron of the arts, he was three times mayor of Palermo, a deputy of the kingdom and ‘vicargeneral’ appointed to deal with the Messina plague in 1743.15 It is recorded that, as mayor in 1746, he spent so much of Palermo’s budget on fireworks to celebrate its escape from the plague that he completely upset the city’s accounts.16

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries nearly all Sicilian nobles moved into the cities, especially Palermo which had a privileged tax status and great social prestige. Absentee landlords had long been a problem in Sicily but now they seemed to repudiate all interest in the land, refusing to invest in their estates or even to visit them. Their agricultural rents were spent on their households in Palermo and in constructing summer villas a few miles outside the walls, at Bagheria to the east of the city and at Piana dei Colli a few miles to the north-west. Once again the Lampedusas were perhaps untypical of their class because there are continuous references to visits to their estates at Palma and Torretta. Nevertheless, they did settle in Palermo and remained there, in the Palazzo Lampedusa beside the Oratory of Santa Zita. A massive palace constructed around three courtyards, the white and yellow facade seventy yards long, it had been built in 1620 and much altered in the following century. Before becoming the home of the Lampedusas, the building had been a seminary.17

After Ferdinando II’s death, his descendants continued for a time to play a role in public life. In 1800–1 his grandson Giulio was mayor of Palermo and a damaged letter from the ruins of the Palazzo Lampedusa indicates some of his more unusual duties: the document is from one of Lampedusa’s officials sent to Tunis with a large amount of money to buy wheat from the Bey, to bribe his chief minister and to ransom six Sicilian slaves.18 After Giulio’s death in 1812, however, the family withdrew almost completely from public affairs and tried to deal with the new economic situation created by the abolition of feudalism and the change in the inheritance laws. The author of The Leopard later wrote that ‘for centuries [the Salina family] had been incapable even of adding up their own expenditure and subtracting their own debts’, a description that could apply to almost every member of the Lampedusa family during its last five generations. Certainly they were quite unable to cope with the Neapolitan law on entails which aimed at dividing up the larger and more unproductive estates and making agriculture more efficient. Laws which permitted the sale of feudal property or its distribution to younger children were crucial to the development of the Sicilian economy, and their inevitable consequence was the decline of the landowning aristocracy.

The chaotic state of the properties at Palma, Torretta and elsewhere, and the demands of numerous creditors, forced Prince Giuseppe III to sell some land before his death. But the energy and tenacity of his young half-German widow, Carolina Wochinger, preserved the bulk of the patrimony for their son Giulio. Two surviving but often illegible letters from Giulio to his mother give a good indication of their preoccupations in the middle of the century. Apart from some family news, they are wholly concerned with business matters: the sale of some property, the repayment of a loan, difficulties with rents, a problem with the administrator, and endless legal disputes – Carolina even took the Benedictine convent at Palma to court, and won.19

The widow’s most spectacular success was the sale of the island of Lampedusa. This useless property had belonged to the family for over 250 years and, in spite of various attempts at colonisation, possessed only twenty-four Maltese inhabitants. In about 1840 Princess Carolina tried to sell the island to Queen Victoria, a move that so alarmed the Neapolitan king, Ferdinand II, that he insisted on buying it himself for the considerable sum of 12,000 ducats.20 Unfortunately, this windfall was not invested profitably but used by Giulio to acquire yet more property in Palermo: another palace in Via Butera, where he gave firework displays during the Santa Rosalia festivities, and a villa at San Lorenzo, a fashionable area in the shadow of Monte Pellegrino where aristrocratic families used to retreat in August. At the villa, a beautiful mellow house constructed around a courtyard in the previous century, the prince built himself a tower with an astronomical observatory.

Prince Giulio was the historical model for The Leopard’s Don Fabrizio, with whom he shares certain characteristics. Giulio was also an enthusiastic astronomer, prepared to travel long distances to see an eclipse, and the possessor of a small scientific library. But he was not a distinguished astronomer, and the claim that he discovered two secondary planets and won a prize at the Sorbonne appears insubstantial.21 Perhaps Giulio had some of the despotic qualities of his fictional counterpart: Giuseppe di Lampedusa used to recount how his great-grandfather changed the date of Easter for his household when the prescribed day was inconvenient for him.22 Yet on the whole he was a milder, weaker and less significant person than Don Fabrizio. He was not interested in politics, although like almost all his fellow peers he signed the proclamation deposing the Bourbons in 1848 and had to beg Ferdinand’s forgiveness the following year. In 1859–60 his sister Princess Niscemi helped the anti-Bourbon forces and her son fought for Garibaldi, but Prince Giulio remained neutral, merely allowing the palace in Via Butera to be used as an observation post by British naval officers.23

During the Risorgimento the British consul in Palermo described the ‘idle, objectless lives’ of the Sicilian aristocrats and claimed that ‘two only of the nobles are men of fortune, none of them are men of energy, and none enjoy the public confidence’.24 Aims and energy were certainly lacking in the lives of the Lampedusas in this period, but they still retained much of their fortune and were able to live comfortably in their villas and palaces in Palermo. It was only after Prince Giulio died in 1885 without leaving a will that the collapse took place. In Sicily it is considered unlucky to make a will, but for a man of seventy who cared deeply about his inheritance, this is unlikely to have been the reason for his failure. Perhaps he simply forgot about it; more probably, as his sons suspected, his widow destroyed it to ensure that the daughters also benefited from the inheritance.25 Whatever happened, the result was disastrous for the estate.

During his lifetime Prince Giulio granted annual sums to his married children, but after his death the property had to be divided evenly between all his sons and daughters. The position was so complicated, and the discord between his nine children so strong, that the entire estate was placed under the control of a ‘judicial administration’. On only one matter was there agreement: in 1886 all his brothers and sisters (except one sister who refused to ratify it for another forty years) ceded their rights to the Palermo home to the new prince Giuseppe.26 Various attempts were made to distribute the rest of the estate – the matter was dealt with by a civil court in Palermo in 1891 and in subsequent years by the Court of Appeal, the Court of Cassation and then the Court of Appeal again – but without success.27 Its division frustrated by squabbling relations, the estate remained under the ‘judicial administration’ for another sixty years. The houses could be lived in but the estate could not be exploited, invested in or otherwise improved, and so its real value declined while the number of interested parties increased. A document drawn up by Giuseppe di Lampedusa in 1938 listed thirty-three adult heirs, almost half of them descendants of Prince Giulio’s daughter Chiara.28

Apart from the Palazzo Lampedusa, Prince Giuseppe stood to inherit one-ninth of his family’s property, which would later have to be divided between his five sons. His heir Don Giulio, father of The Leopard’s author, could thus expect barely two per cent of his grandfather’s patrimony, a dismal prospect for a proud and quarrelsome prince determined to live in aristocratic style. But it was not one with which his uncles and aunts had much sympathy. There seems to have been little clan solidarity among these two generations of Lampedusas, and the wills of their childless members never benefited the head of the family. When Filomeno died in Dover in 1892 (like Giovanni in The Leopard he had gone to England to work as a clerk in a coal depot), he left his inheritance not to Prince Giuseppe but to his two other brothers.29 When his unmarried sisters died later, their portions were left to a third unmarried sister, Concetta.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s spinster great-aunts lived the last decades of their lives much as he described them in his novel, amassing a collection of dubious religious relics at the Villa Spaccaforno. Perhaps he was too kind to Concetta, a bigoted and uncharitable woman who seemed to relish the financial difficulties of her married relations. After the deaths of her sisters, she owned a third of Prince Giulio’s estate which she proposed to leave to her widowed sister-in-law Stella – in spite of the fact that Stella already possessed her husband’s portion and part of Filomeno’s, and in any case had no children. In his youth Giuseppe di Lampedusa was made to visit this fanatical great-aunt with his mother and send her postcards from abroad, but Concetta refused to change her mind. At her death in 1930 she left nothing to him or any of her nephews (whose impoverishment she was fully aware of: one of them lived in an attic in her house), but made Stella her sole heiress. Four months later Stella herself died, leaving her enlarged assets (now half of Prince Giulio’s fortune) to a spendthrift nephew in Naples whom she had adopted on condition he spent a few days each year with her in Palermo.30 At this stage Don Giulio contested Concetta’s will, claiming she had lost her memory and mental faculties and that she had been dominated by Stella. But as there was no evidence to support him, he was unsuccessful. The Lampedusa fortune was now irrecoverable. Don Giulio’s aristocratic lifestyle had long been maintained by his wife’s money and the generosity of some of his friends, but these sources had now virtually dried up. When he died shortly afterwards, there was little for his son to inherit.

In The Leopard Lampedusa refrained from describing the last stages of the decline of the Salina family. But he gave Don Fabrizio the opportunity to speculate from his deathbed on the final generations. After him, he believed, there would be no more memories or traditions, and the possessions of centuries, the tapestries, the almond groves, even the statues, would disappear so that his heir could spend money on cancan girls and foie gras. And the family would go with them. ‘He had said that the Salina would always remain the Salina. He had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi, that bearded Vulcan had won after all.’

The Lampedusas’ decline was even more dramatic than that prophesied by Don Fabrizio for the Salina. But they did have one advantage over their fictional counterparts: at the end of the line there was one person who remembered and understood the traditions of his family and who was able, at the last moment, to transform them into literature.

* Giuseppe di Lampedusa used to refer to this palace in conversation and in his memoirs as Casa Lampedusa because he felt the word palazzo had been ‘debased’ by its application to modern blocks of flats. One of his cousins, however, has since explained that people called their own palace a casa because ‘it was supposed to be common’ to refer to it as a palazzo. 3

2

A Sicilian Childhood

ONE OF GIUSEPPE DI LAMPEDUSA’s earliest memories can be dated to 30 July 1900, when he was three and a half. He was sitting on the floor while his mother was at her dressing table, brushing her hair with the help of her Piedmontese maid Teresa, when his father rushed into the room with some dramatic news. Giuseppe remembered his mother dropping her long-handled silver brush, Teresa exclaiming ‘Good Lord!’ in Piedmontese, and the consternation in the room. Later he was told that Don Giulio had been announcing the assassination of King Umberto.31

From that same period Giuseppe recalled staying with the Florio family on the island of Favignana. One morning he was woken earlier than usual by his Sienese nanny, dressed up in smart clothes and taken out on to the veranda. Among a group of people in cane chairs ‘sat a very old, very bent lady with an aquiline nose, enwrapped in widow’s weeds which were waving wildly about in the wind’. She bent towards Giuseppe, said something which he did not understand, and kissed him on the forehead with the words ‘Quel joli petit!’ In the afternoon it was explained that the old lady was Eugénie, the widow of Napoleon III, whose yacht was anchored close by. Having dined with the Florios the previous evening, the former empress had decided to pay them a farewell visit at seven the next morning, during which she had inconveniently asked to meet the children.32

Lampedusa recalled these incidents in the summer of 1955, two years before his death. He had been rereading Stendhal’s autobiography, Vie de Henry Brulard, and was much impressed by its ‘immediacy of feeling’ and ‘obvious sincerity’. It was ‘a remarkable attempt to shovel away accumulated memories and reach the essence’ and had a quality of memory Lampedusa regretted he could not match. Stendhal seemed to remember everything about his childhood, particularly the episodes when he was bullied and tyrannised, whereas for Lampedusa childhood was a period when everyone was good to him and he was ‘king of the home’. Looking back at the age of fifty-eight past a life that had been vexatious, disappointing and often pathetic, he recalled his infancy as ‘a lost Earthly Paradise’.33

Giuseppe’s childhood was based at the Lampedusa home, that vast palace in the middle of Palermo in an area mostly ‘crawling with hovels and wretchedness’. It was the main anchor to his life for nearly fifty years: shortly before its destruction in 1943 he was still sleeping in the bedroom in which he had been born. As the only child living in the palace, it was

a real kingdom for a boy alone, a kingdom either empty or sparsely populated by figures unanimously well-disposed … I was its absolute master and would run continually through its vast expanses, climbing the great staircase from the courtyard to the loggia on the roof, from which could be seen the sea and Monte Pellegrino and the whole city as far as Porta Nuova and Monreale.34

Lampedusa’s memories of the palace were often sensual. He recalled forgotten smells, of his grandparents’ kitchen or the violets in his mother’s dressing room, felt again the polished leather in the saddle rooms, remembered the stuffiness of the stables. He could picture too the contrasting styles of the many rooms: the great hall flagged in white and grey marble, the ballroom frescoes of mythological scenes packed with ‘all the deities of Olympus’, or the ceiling of his mother’s boudoir ‘scattered with flowers and branches of old coloured stucco’. Lampedusa was always sensitive to the quality of light. Describing the ‘perspective of drawing rooms extending one after the other for the length of the facade’, he recalled

the magic of light, which in a city with so intense a sun as Palermo is concentrated or variegated according to the weather, even in narrow streets. The light was sometimes diluted by the silk curtains hanging before balconies, or heightened by beating on some gilt frame or yellow damask chair which reflected it back; sometimes, particularly in summer, these rooms were dark, yet through the closed blinds filtered a sense of the luminous power that was outside; or sometimes at certain hours a single ray would penetrate straight and clear as that of Sinai, populated with myriads of dust particles and going to vilify the colours of carpets, uniformly ruby-red throughout all the drawing rooms: a real sorcery of illumination and colour which entranced my mind for ever. Sometimes I rediscover this luminous quality in some old palace or church, and it would wrench at my heart were I not ready to brush it aside with some wicked joke. 35*

Giuseppe grew up in a world populated by domestic servants and adult relations. In one wing of the piano nobile he lived with his parents; in the other were the apartments of his paternal grandparents. On the floor above lived his bachelor uncles until their quarrels with his father Giulio forced them to leave. In the memoirs of his childhood Giuseppe recalled little of his grandparents except that until his schooldays he spent the afternoons reading in their apartments. ‘At five o’clock my grandfather would call me into his study to give me my afternoon refreshment – a hunk of hard bread and a large glass of cold water.’ The elderly Prince Giuseppe was a dull, conventional man, though he had the un-Sicilian habit of keeping a diary. Unluckily, one of the few things recorded of him is that he had malodorous feet and on that account was known to some people as ‘Piedifitusi’.36 His ten-volume diaries reveal that he lived a dreary life, based on undeviating routines in which horse-riding and religious services were prominent.37 In The Leopard there is a strong hint of his dullness in the character of Don Fabrizio’s eldest son Paolo. His wife Stefania, however, was a more interesting and sympathetic person who used to read poetry and sometimes even wrote it. She evidently got on well with her grandson and one of her letters, thanking him for writing and for not forgetting her in old age, survives.