Italian author, Duke of Palma, and Prince of Lampedusa, best remembered for the novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958, filmed in 1963), sometimes compared to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind or to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It drew on his family's history and described the reactions of a noble family to the social and political changes following the liberation of Sicily by Garibaldi in 1860. Lampedusa published nothing during his lifetime except for three articles that appeared in an obscure Genoese periodical in the 1920s.

Chevalley thought: "This state of things won't last; our lively new modern administration will change it all." The Prince was depressed. "All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always,' of course, a century, two centuries . . . and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards and the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth." (from The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun, London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1960, p. 173; published under the title Il Gattopardo, Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1958)

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was born in Palermo into one of the oldest families of Sicilian aristocracy. His father was the duke of Palma, and his grandfather was the prince of Lampedusa. Once very wealthy and influential, the Lampedusas had lost most of their property by that time. Little is known about Lampedusa's private life. He lived a wild youth and only his mother, Beatrice Filangeri di Cutó, could keep him under control. Likewise the family did not approve of his enthusiasm for literature - in the family library he read books of all kinds in several languages.

During World War I Lampedusa served in the Italian army as an artillery officer, but was captured by the Austrians and imprisoned in Hungary. After escaping he returned to Italy on foot. His plans for a diplomatic career were ended by a nervous breakdown. The influence of his mother, with whom he spent much time abroad, hindered his literary ambitions. After she died, Lampedusa was free to devote himself to his calling. "Even if a revolution breaks out," he wrote from Paris, "no one will touch a hair on my head or steal one penny from me because by my side I have... Mussolini!" (Childhood Memories and Other Stories by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, translated by Stephen Parkin, foreword by Ian Thomson, edited by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi and Alessandro Gallenzi, London: Alma Classics, 2013, pp. vii-viii) Later, however, his attitude toward Fascism changed.

In 1926-27 Lampedusa published in a Genoese periodical three articles; his series of brief introductions to French writers of the 16th century, Invito alle Lettere francesi del Cinquecento, came out in 1970, and Lezioni su Stendhal (Lessons on Stendhal) appeared in book form in 1977. Lampedusa especially admired Stendhal's The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Originally he gave 'Lezioni su Stendhal' to a group of young friends. It was first published in Paragone in April 1959. One of his favorite English writers was Izaak Walton. "Hitler and Mussolini," he once stated, "had obviously not read Izaak Walton."

Lampedusa married in 1932 (or 1934, according to some sources) the Baroness Alessandra Wolff-Stomersee, a Latvian exile and Freudian analyst he met in London, where his uncle was Italian ambassador. The couple lived much of their lives apart because Alessandra did not come along with Lampedusa's eccentric mother and insisted on living in Latvia. During the reign of the Fascists Lampedusa opposed the government of Mussolini and lived for long periods abroad. His Palermo house was detroyed by American bombings in 1943. Lampedusa managed to save the family Bellini. After the war he returned to Palermo, where he lived in a house on the Via Butera. For a period he served as president of the Red Cross in Sicily.

Lampedusa was somewhat consistent in his daily routines. He spend much of the day reading, sat with his friends in the Café Mazzara or at his club, and late in the afternoon he met young writers and students at home. In 1954 he attended a literary meeting in northern Italy, at which his cousin, Lucio Piccolo, was awarded a prize for his poetry. Next year he started to write his masterwork, which he had had in mind for many years. In this Lampedusa was supported by his wife, who had became one of the leading psychoanalysts in Italy and who encouraged her husband to write of his early life. 

The Leopard is a chronicle of the Unification's effect on Sicily, dating from Garibaldi's landing on the island in 1860 to the final decline of a once-opulent Sicilian family. Don Fabrizio says: "I am sorry; but I cannot lift a finger in politics. It would only get bitten. These are things one can't say to a Sicilian; and if you'd said them yourself, I too would have objected." (Ibid., p. 172) Episodic in form, the book consists of eight chapters, and each of the chapters is marked by a date, the first and last being May 1860 and May 1910, thus covering fifty years of history. Lampedusa's spokesman and the protagonist is Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina - the leopard in the title; it is also the emblem of the family coat of arms. The character was based on Lampedusa's great-grandfather Giulio Fabrizio. Il Gattopardo represents a variation on the classical form of the historical novel in that it permits the present to intrude into the past. The omniscient narrator hints at what will happen after the story is finished. Don Fabrizio accepts that his nephew, Tancredi, joins the rebels, but sees the aristocracy displaced by the middle class.

Besides being a story of the decline of a Sicilian aristocratic family, the novel is a meditation on mortality.  After chapter 7, the prince's deathbed scene, in which he sums up the small number of joyful hours as against his seventy years of boredom, the view deepens into psychological narrative. However, the story does not end in his death, but the final chapter, set in 1910, shows what had happened to Don Fabrizio's family.

There is also a dog named Bendicò, "a virtually important character and practically the key to the novel," as Lampedusa stated in 1957 in a letter to his friend Enrico Merlo di Tagliavia. ('Foreword,' The Leopard, translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun; foreword and appendix by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, translated from the Italian by Guido Waldman, London, Pantheon Books, 2007, p. xiii) Lampedusa and his wife had many dogs. The most loved was called Crab, after Lance's happy-go-lucky dog in Shakespeare's The Two Gentleman of Verona. ('Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Reads and Teaches English Literature: A Case of Sicilian Anglophilia' by Francesca Orestano, Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, Vol. 18, 2021, p. 114)

Lampedusa submitted the manuscript anonymously. A lifelong smoker, he died of lung cancer in Rome on July 23, 1957, before the book appeared. He was the last person to hold the title of Prince of Lampedusa (a small  island in the Mediterranean). Lampedusa's firm wish was that his death should go unannounced either in the press or by any other means.

Four chapters of his novel had been rejected by Mondadori in 1956, and then it was rejected by the novelist and critic Elio Vittoriani, who worked for the Einaudi publishing firm. Lampedusa's widow sent the manuscript to Elena Craveri, Benedetto Croce's daughter, who showed it to Giorgio Bassani, the chief editor of Feltrinelli - Bassani's perhaps most famous book was Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1962). Lampedusa's melodramatic historical novel caused a sensation and it received the most prestigious Italian literary award, the Strega Prize. Carlo Muscetta, who taught Italian literature at the University of Catania, claimed in 1968 that the published text had in certain sense been rewritten by Bassani. A fresh edition, based on Lampedusa's 1957 manuscript, came out in 1969.

Racconti, which appeared also posthumously (1961), contains among others the short story 'The Professor and the Siren,' known also as 'Lighea'. It was finished in January 1957, after Lampedusa's return from a trip to Augusta, on the eastern side of Sicily. The aging professor of the title, Rosario La Ciura, recalls his encounter with a sixteen-year-old siren named Lighea; she is the daughter of Calliope. She says in Greek: "Don't believe the stories about us. We don't kill anyone, we only love." At the end the reader is told that La Ciura had fallen from a ship and his body had not been found. La Ciura leaves to his friend, a young journalist, an ancient Greek vase, which shows Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship and the Sirens.

Lampedusa never planned to be a one-book author. When he died, Lampedusa was preparing a second novel, I Gattini ciechi (The Blind Kittens). His essays have been published in two volumes (1959, 1971).

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). Film 1963, directed by Luchino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster (Don Fabrizio), Alain Delon (Tancredi), Claudia Cardinale (Angelica Sedara), Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli, Romolo Valli. - The story is set in Sicily in the 1860s, in the times when Garibaldi campaigned to unite the disparate provinces into an Italian state. Prince Don Fabrizio of Salina represents the old order of nobility but acknowledges the changing world. He is called the Leopard after his family crest. His nephew Tancredi falls in love with Angelica, the daughter of the mayor Don Calogero, a member of the rising middle-class. Their union will cross class barriers. At a ball to herald Angelica's arrival in society, the Prince is overcome with bitter nostalgia for the past. His position as one among the last of a dying breed is further enforced by the execution of four traitors. The spectacular ball sequence took 36 to shoot and takes up the last third of the film. Visconti himself was a Milan-born aristocrat and communist. He had earlier depicted times of Risorgimento in Senso (1954).

The firm of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli had earlier discovered and published Boris Pasternak's Doktor Zhivago. Although The Leopard elicited contrasting and polemical responses - Carlo Levi called it "another sign of decadence" - it became an instant bestseller and was praised for its poetic treatment of the human condition. Italian Marxist critics saw its historical vision as narrow and Catholic intellectuals rejected its pessimistic outlook and anticlerical views. Historically the book appeared just at the right moment, on the eve of the celebration of the anniversary of Italian unity. Contrary to the classical form of the historical novel, Don Fabrizio's subjective voice does not aim at objectivity - he is the narrator who has grown disillusioned with the Unification's effects. His scepticism about new ideas and reforms struck a chord with many intellectuals, and signalled the end of neo-realistic fiction.

For further reading: I Gattopardi di Donnafugata by Andrea Vitello (1963); Invito alla letture di Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa by Giancarlo Buzzi (1972); Tomasi di Lampedusa by Simonetta Salvestroni (1973); Aspects of the Novel, and Related Writings by E. M. Forster (1974); Il Gattopardo, i racconti, Lampedusa by Giuseppe Paolo Samona (1974); 'Lampedusa, Giuseppe (Maria Fabrizio) Tomasi di, Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma,' in World Authors 1950-1970, ed. by John Wakeman (1975); Writers and Politics in Modern Italy by John Gatt-Rutter (1978); The Modern Italian Novel from Pea to Moravia by Sergio Pacifici (1979); I Gattopardi e le iene by N. Zago (1983); The Last Leopard by David Gilmour (1988); Plotting the Past by Cristina Della Colletta (1996); I misteri del Gattopardo: ricordi di vite parallele: Tomasi di Lampedusa, Lucio Piccolo, e Beatrice di Cutò by Franco Valenti (2000); Tomasi di Lampedusa e i luoghi del Gattopardo by Maria Antonietta Ferraloro (2014); Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa by Salvatore Savoia (2010); 'For a New Reading of Lampedusa's "Lighea," in Studies in Modern Italian Fiction by Maria Grazia Di Paolo; preface by Joseph Tusiani (2016); Lampedusa by Steven Price (2019); Il testamento di Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa by Salvatore La Monica; con la collaborazione di Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi e Maria Russo (2021); Lampedusa e la Spagna by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi; a cura di Alejandro Luque; con una nota di Salvatore Silvano Nigro (2024)

Selected works:

• Il Gattopardo, 1958 (standard edition, 1969)
  - The Leopard (translated by Archibald Colquhoun; preface by E.M. Forster, 1962)
  - Tiikerikissa (suom. Tyyni Tuulio, 1959)
  - Film adaptation in 1963, prod. Titanus, Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma, Société Générale de Cinématographie (S.G.C.), screenplay and adaptation by Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, Massimo Franciosa, Luchono Visconti, directed by Luchino Visconti, starring Burt Lancaster (as Prince Don Fabrizio Salina), Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli, Romolo Valli, Terence Hill; TV series 2025, directed by Tom Shankland, Giuseppe Capotondi and Laura Luchetti, starring Deva Cassel (Angelica Sedara), Kim Rossi Stuart (Don Fabrizio Corbera), Benedetta Porcaroli (Concetta Corbera of Salina), music by Paolo Bonvino, cinematography by Nicolai Brüel
  
• Lezioni su Stendhal, 1959 (introduction by Philippe Renard, 1977)
• I Racconti, 1961
  - Two Stories and a Memory (translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1966) / Childhood Memories and Other Stories by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (translated by Stephen Parkin, foreword by Ian Thomson, edited by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi and Alessandro Gallenzi, 2013)
  - Seireeni ja muita kertomuksia (suom. Tyyni Tuulio, 1962)
• Invito alle Lettere francesi del Cinquecento, 1971
• I racconti ... Il mattino di un mezzadro, La gioia e la legge, Lighea, I luoghi della mia prima infanzia, 1972
  - Places of My Infancy: a Memory (translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 2012) / The Professor and the Siren (translated by Stephen Twilley; introduction by Marina Warner, 2014; US title: The Professor and the Mermaid) / Childhood Memories and Other Stories (translated by Stephen Parkin, foreword by Ian Thomson, 2013)
• Lettere a Licy: un matrimonio epistolare, 1984
• Letteratura inglese, 1990-91 (2 vols., edited by Nicoletta Polo)  
• Scritti ritrovati, 1993 (edited by  Andrea Vitello, preface by D'Orsi Meli, introduction by Andrea Vitello) 
• Opere, 1995 (introduction by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, edited by Nicoletta Polo)
• The Siren and Selected Writings, 1995 (translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun, David Gilmour and Guido Waldman; with introductions by David Gilmour)
• Licy e il gattopardo: lettere d’amore di Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1995 (edited by Sabino Caronia)
• Viaggio in Europa: Epistolario 1925-1930, 2006 (edited by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi and Salvatore Silvano Nigro)
  - Letters from London and Europe, 1925-30 (translated by J.G. Nichols, 2010)
• The Professor and the Siren, 2014 (translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley; introduction by Marina Warner; New York: New York Review Books)