Il Gattopardo

The Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo [il ˌɡattoˈpardo]) is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento. Published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli, after two rejections by the leading Italian publishing houses Mondadori and Einaudi, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 1959, it won Italy's highest award for fiction, the Strega Prize. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "the 10 best historical novels". The novel was also made into an award-winning 1963 film of the same name, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon. Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily. He had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa. But after the Lampedusa palace near Palermo was bombed and pillaged during the Allied invasion of Sicily, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression. To combat his feelings he began to write Il Gattopardo. Despite being universally known in English as The Leopard, the original Italian title is Il Gattopardo which refers to the serval, a much smaller animal. Although uncommon north of the Sahara Desert, one of the serval's few North African ranges is quite near Lampedusa. The symbol on the Tomasi di Lampedusa coat of arms is the serval, and though unusual, servals were owned by some Sicilians as exotic pets.