Sicilian Prince and writer (1896-1957)
People connected to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
He wrote one novel, never saw it published, and died thinking it would vanish with him. Instead Il Gattopardo became the most widely read Italian novel of the twentieth century — a requiem for Sicily's aristocracy during the Risorgimento, written by the last prince of a line about to go extinct.
Giuseppe Tomasi was born in 1896 into Sicilian nobility, the 11th Prince of Lampedusa, and grew up solitary by preference: "I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people." Reserved, misanthropic, he spent his days reading and meditating — by 1954 he claimed ten of his sixteen waking hours were passed alone. He worked on Il Gattopardo in private, setting it in his native Sicily during the Risorgimento, but no publisher would take it. He died in July 1957. The novel appeared posthumously in 1958, became a sensation, and the Tomasi line — titles and all — e…
Sourced, dated quotes from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties.
Perhaps the greatest novel of the century.
No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does.
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