Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa
(Giuseppe Tomasi, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa; Palermo, 1896-Rome, 1957) Italian writer author of the novel El Gatopardo ( 1958), in which he portrayed the decline of Sicilian rural nobility during the time of national unification.Luchino Visconti's masterful film adaptation, premiered in 1963, contributed to the dissemination of a work that already had an excellent reception at the time of its publication.
Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa
Descendant of one of the most aristocratic Sicilian families, Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa spent his childhood within the walls of the paternal palace in the capital of the island and the various country houses.As a child he learned the main foreign languages.At the age of twenty, when the First World War broke out, he was forced to abandon his studies to participate in the war; taken prisoner, he was interned in the concentration camp of Szombathely (Hungary), from where, after a first unsuccessful attempt, he managed to escape, and, after a very hard march on foot through Europe, he arrived in Italy.
During the fascist period he remained aloof, consistent with his leanings as a liberal conservative.He made several trips abroad; during one of them he married Alessandra Woll-Stomersee, one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Italy.With the rank of captain he took part in the Second World War; After the destruction of his home in the course of a bombardment, Tomasi de Lampedusa found refuge in the home of his cousin, the poet L.Piccolo, in whose house he had his first and fundamental literary encounters (Eugenio Montale, Giorgio Bassani).
Between 1955-56 he wrote at once the work that was to give him great posthumous fame, El Gatopardo ( Il Gattopardo ), a written book, as has been said, quickly, but developed over very long years.Some months later, the first symptoms of the disease that would lead to his death appeared, during his hospitalization in a Roman clinic.The manuscript of the novel was published in 1958 in the care of Giorgio Bassani.
Frame from El Gatopardo (1963), by Luchino Visconti
Set in the world of the Sicilian aristocracy of the years between the Garibaldina campaign and the end of the century, El Gatopardo tells the story of Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, an astronomer.Always removed from any participation in public life, with the arrival of the Garibaldinos, and under the influence of his beloved nephew Tancredi, he stoically accept the new course of things, although an initial mistrust can never leave his mind.
Focusing the plot on the story of Don Fabrizio, Tomasi de Lampedusa manages to present us with a broad overview of the life of the aristocratic Sicilian families of the time, to which they were increasingly opposed, at least in the attainment of power, the nouveau riche, that is, those who had known how to profit from the fall of the Bourbon dynasty.However, the bitter conclusion of Tomasi de Lampedusa will be, in the pages that describe the final dance, that things have changed very little and that also the new situation will very soon crystallize in the atavistic inertia of Sicilian life.
The poetics of Tomasi de Lampedusa is constituted by the examination of both man and things, by a continuous sense of fine morality that defines the particular tone of the novel.Although some of its pages, especially towards the end, may seem somewhat hasty, El Gatopardo , which appeared at the height of neorealism, constituted (in the words of one critic) "a very happy exception...an invitation to enrich the narrative of authentic critical motivations, but above all to reconsider, in its most current values, the nineteenth-century tradition ".The book was a great success, not only in Italy, but in many other countries.In 1961, a volume of Tales appeared posthumously where, according to the inspiration of his larger work, the author confirms himself as a fine interpreter of his own memory.
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