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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Sicilian Prince and writer (1896-1957) · Italy · Writers · Died at 60

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is read about 480 times a day, in 48 languages.

A typical day, 30 days to 27 September 2026

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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.

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Photos 8

In their own words 3

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Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
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3 statements, newest first
  1. 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.

    E. M. Forster, Introduction to Lampedusa's Two Stories and a Memory (New York: Pantheon, 1962) p. 13., Own words

  2. Perhaps the greatest novel of the century.

    L. P. Hartley on The Leopard, quoted in Robin Healey Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation (Toronto: University of, Own words

  3. 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.

    Martin Seymour-Smith Guide to Modern World Literature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) vol. 3, p. 30., Own words

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Awards

Strega Prize1959

In their orbit

Spouse: Alexandra Wolff Stomersee

About this person

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 - ended with his generation.

Country
Italy
Category
Writers
Type
Writer / Author
Status
deceased
Dates
Lived 1896 to 1957 · aged 60

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