The Author

A Solitary Prince

Giuseppe Tomasi was born in Palermo on December 23, 1896, into one of the oldest and most illustrious aristocratic families in Sicily. The Tomasi di Lampedusa were princes — the title came from the tiny island of Lampedusa, between Sicily and Tunisia, which the family had once owned. His childhood was spent in the family palazzo in Palermo, a vast, fading apartment in the Palazzo Lampedusa alla Pietà, and at the country estate of Santa Margherita Belice.

His mother, Beatrice Toscolo, was a strong-willed woman who taught him French, English, and a love of literature. His father, Giulio Maria, was a quiet, introverted man whose passion was astronomy — a detail that would resurface in the character of Don Fabrizio, the stargazing Prince of Salina. Young Giuseppe was a solitary child, introspective and bookish, more comfortable in the family library than in society.

The 1908 Messina earthquake destroyed the Santa Margherita estate and deeply affected the family. In his memoirs, Lampedusa recalled the Sicily of his childhood as a place already fading — a world of faded palazzi, empty ballrooms, and old servants who remembered better days. This vanished Sicily became the emotional landscape of The Leopard.

War, Prison, and Loss

Lampedusa's life was shaped by catastrophe. In 1915, during World War I, he enlisted as an artillery officer — the same branch as his fictional Prince. He was captured at Caporetto in 1917 and held in a Hungarian prisoner-of-war camp. He escaped on foot through Yugoslavia, returning to Italy in ill health.

After the war, he married Alexandra Wolff Stomersee in 1932, a Baltic-German anthropologist he met in Rome. The marriage was unusual: she lived in her own apartment in Palermo, and they communicated largely through letters. The family palazzo was bombed and destroyed by Allied air raids in 1943, destroying the library — the loss Lampedusa felt most deeply. His mother died in 1946, and the last of the family estates were gone.

Writing The Leopard

By the early 1950s, Lampedusa was a man without a fortune, living in a modest apartment in Palermo. He spent his days reading, going to the cinema, and teaching English and French literature to a small group of students — including Francesco Orlando, who would later become a major literary critic. He had written almost nothing for publication.

Then, in 1954, he attended a conference in San Pellegrino Terme, where he met among others Eugenio Montale and other literary figures. Something shifted. Returning to Palermo, he began writing with extraordinary intensity. In a burst of creative energy that lasted roughly two years, he completed The Leopard, along with several short stories and critical essays. The novel was based closely on his great-grandfather, Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, the last Prince of Lampedusa, and the events of the Risorgimento in Sicily.

He finished the manuscript in 1956. He sent it to two publishers. The first, Mondadori, showed no interest. The second, Einaudi — Italy's most prestigious literary publisher — rejected it. Elena Croce, the reader at Einaudi, reportedly found it “old-fashioned” and felt it lacked the experimental vigor of contemporary Italian literature. It was a devastating blow.

Death and Resurrection

On July 23, 1957, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa died of lung cancer in Rome at the age of 60. He had never seen his novel published. He was buried in the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo — the same eerie underground corridors where Sicilian nobles had been interred for centuries, a fittingly baroque resting place for the last of his line.

After his death, his friend Guido Lajolo took the manuscript to the publisher Feltrinelli. This time, the reception was different. Feltrinelli published Il Gattopardoin November 1958. It became an immediate sensation, winning the Strega Prize in 1959 — Italy's most prestigious literary award — and selling over a million copies. The rejection by Einaudi became one of the most infamous misjudgments in publishing history.

Lampedusa had no heirs. His title died with him. But the novel he left behind — written by a man who had outlived his world, in the silence of a Palermo apartment — became one of the best-loved books in the Italian language, translated into dozens of languages, and adapted into one of the greatest films ever made.