Shankland was drawn to the prince’s intellectual curiosity as he faces the creaks of his crumbling dynasty, and suggests that he has a “sort of ‘can’t go on, must go on’ power.” Don Fabrizio’s old-guard ideals around aristocratic power can only be challenged by his adored nephew Tancredi, whose youthful revolutionary energy sees him joining Garibaldi’s call to paint Sicily green, white, and red forever. Shankland calls Tancredi “the ultimate disrupter and influencer” whose inflated charm and ambition fuel his hunger for change: “Like so many young people, he has a feeling the world he is born into is broken and stultifying. He wants to break free and fix things,” Shankland says.

All along the way, the contrasting worlds of Don Fabrizio and Tancredi are further populated by fellow Sicilians across the class spectrum — like the sirenic, middle-class Angelica Sedàra — and we see in their divergences Tancredi’s idea that things must change to stay the same. 

Much like the nineteenth-century Risorgimento era that author Lampedusa portrays, the novel was also birthed during a period of transition — and nearly wasn’t published at all.

Born in 1896, Prince Lampedusa had largely busied his aristocratic life with the care of his family’s gilded palace that glowed atop the scorched earth on the island of Sicily — surrounded with olive groves, citrus trees, and the insistent heat of a thousand suns. In its long history, Sicily had been taken over by the Greeks, Moors, Normans, and Bourbons before the Italians arrived, and it is this palimpsest that Shankland’s team wanted to explore visually, “with a real sense of threat and violence not far from the surface,” says Shankland. “We also wanted to evoke a certain haunting, fragile, [and] beautiful spirit of a Sicily that is always being hounded and chased by invaders.”

By the 1950s, Lampedusa’s Italy was modernizing. The post-war era saw an economic boom, a growing working-class consciousness, and a strengthening middle class now furnishing their homes with refrigerators for the first time. Mid-century literature and cinema orbited these themes, emboldened by the strengthening calls to socialism and labor movements that underpinned post-war Italy.

It was within this milieu that aristocrat Lampedusa wrote The Leopard. With no heirs of his own, Lampedusa realized he would be the last prince to carry his family title and decided to depict the story of the ruling family of Sicily — his own family — as they ceded aristocratic,
feudal power to democracy.

Lampedusa had barely finished his opus when he fell ill, but he lived just long enough to receive two rejection letters from publishers — the last of which arrived days before his death. It’s possible that the lavishness and depictions of wealth in The Leopard just didn’t connect with this new world. But the book’s decadence belies Lampedusa’s own class awareness, showing through his novel what it means to give up power in a world hell-bent on seizing it. Lampedusa’s own ethos is analogous to that of his fictional prince of Salina, who, Shankland notes, “finally concludes that his time is over — the leopards will be gone, to be replaced by jackals and hyenas.”

Lampedusa’s wife and adopted son continued to circulate the manuscript until it fell into the hands of Giorgio Bassani, an editor at Feltrinelli, the famous publishing house led by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, whose life also contained multitudes. (After starting his teenage years as a posh Mussolini sympathizer, Feltrinelli published leftist communist pamphlets by the likes of Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara for decades before his suspicious death by dynamite.) The Leopard was published posthumously in 1958 to overnight success, becoming one of the top-selling novels in Italian history. In 1959, it earned Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize for fiction. It wasn’t until years later that a relative found additional notes to the manuscript in the family palazzo hidden in a copy of The Voyages of Captain Cook — unsurprising, given Lampedusa’s proclivity to use old books as hiding places. The notes connected the dots between The Leopard’s Salinas and the real-life Lampedusas and the friends and politicians on which they were based. 

Like many members of his class, Lampedusa hadn’t participated much in political life; but history finally came for those who believed they transcended power. What haunts The Leopard is Lampedusa’s late-in-life recognition of the uncertain future that comes with moments of transition. Of the House of Salina, Lampedusa writes in The Leopard: “From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down, smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943.” This wink to the future was the author’s way of shining a light on his own family history: The real-life palazzo in which he planned to live forever was bombed just like the Salinas’. Lampedusa knew that no empire is eternal; the pendulum swings.

The Leopard remains one of the most beloved Italian novels of all time and was first adapted soon after its publication by director Luchino Visconti — it’s your favorite film buff’s favorite film, which found Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, and Alain Delon face off in a Sicilian palazzo. To this day, the story of The Leopard garners the adulation of the likes of Martin Scorsese and shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, who says he rereads the novel every few years for inspiration. 

With the latest adaptation of The Leopard, we have a fresh lens on this famous tome. Balancing grand Sicilian vistas, romance, opulent balls, and bandits, The Leopard presents a glorious spectacle that Shankland says is rooted in a “very powerful and intimate theme . . . about family love and the fear of losing it in the face of political and social upheavals.”