Book· 1958· Historical

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard): 1 recorded work traces back to it, and it draws on 1 recorded source.

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  • Italian unification

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel follows a Sicilian prince as Garibaldi's landing in 1860 brings the island into a unified Italy and the old aristocracy yields to a new class.

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About the work

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)

Set in the 1860s, The Leopard is the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. Published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli, after two rejections by the leading Italian publishing houses Mondadori and Einaudi, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 1959, it won Italy's highest award for fiction, the Strega Prize. In 2012, The Guardian named it as one of "the 10 best historical novels" and in 2026, The Guardian named it as 46th in "the best 100 novels of all time". The novel was made into an award-winning 1963 film of the same name, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon.

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