The Leopard
Sicily, 1860. Garibaldi's red-shirted volunteers have landed at Marsala, the Bourbon kingdom is collapsing, and Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, watches his world dissolve from the windows of his palace at Donnafugata. Aging, lucid, and quietly disenchanted, he understands what his class refuses to: that the new Italy will be ruled by men like his ambitious nephew Tancredi and the rich peasant mayor Don Calogero, and that the old aristocracy will survive only by changing everything in order to change nothing. Through a Sicilian summer of weddings, hunts, plebiscites, and astronomical reveries, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa traces the decline of a great house and of an entire social order. Published posthumously in 1958, Il Gattopardo is one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century European fiction, a meditation on time, decay, and the strange consolations of those who outlive their own world.
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It is 1860 and Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, watches Garibaldi's volunteers march onto Sicily and into his own household through his ambitious nephew Tancredi. The novel follows the prince across the next two decades as a new bourgeoisie buys up his land and his world fades.
The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1958) is dense with allusions to 19th-century Sicilian aristocracy and politics. Most readers find Archibald Colquhoun's translation accessible despite the cultural distance. The novel is around 250 pages.
Yes. Luchino Visconti directed a 1963 film adaptation starring Burt Lancaster. The film is widely considered one of the great Italian films and won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. A 2025 Netflix series adaptation also exists.
The Leopard was written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published in 1958 by Time.
The Leopard is 282 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Leopard takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Leopard is a standalone novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, not part of a series.
The Leopard is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
