Diary: Rebecca Chace on Lampedusa’s Island

Books, like islands, appear and disappear.

A low fog obscures your determination finally to read that book you heard so much about, and it’s just possible to convince yourself that you’ve already read it. Maybe in school? Islands also have the ability to seem farther or closer than they are until they appear right off the bow, a dark gray outline with a few disembodied lights along the shore, and the sound of waves.

I thought I had read The Leopard, by Giuseppe de Lampedusa, when I was a teenager—I was wrong. I knew that I’d never been to Sicily, where the novel takes place, but I didn’t expect to go anywhere in the summer of 2021. The pandemic wasn’t over, it was simply coming in and out of focus depending on the position of your ship. In New York, I had watched the body bags and death toll mount in Italy; they watched us as the city parked refrigerator-truck morgues by the curb and built a field hospital in Central Park. We all paced inside our apartments and got good at pretending that Zoom wasn’t so bad. After the Italians started applauding their essential workers from the balcony, we did the same from our fire escapes.

Nothing would ever be the same, we told each other, secretly hoping that we were wrong, and the dead would rise.

Then I received an invitation to a six-week writing fellowship in Italy, along with a letter on impressive stationary written in both English and Italian that would open the still-closed border between our countries. Once I was fully vaxxed, tested, and through passport control the summer seemed like an intermission in the “global death event” as a friend calls it. I saw no reason to rush home, where too many states still pulsed from red to orange on the digital pandemic map. I bought a ticket to Sicily and borrowed a copy of The Leopard from the library of an American friend.

Giuseppe Tomasi, the last Prince of Lampedusa, died in 1957 thinking the novel he wrote at sixty would never be published. The Leopard became a bestseller a year later. The irony of this wouldn’t have surprised its main character, Prince Fabrizio Salina, who is modelled on the author’s great-grandfather. The novel is set in the mid-nineteenth century, during the “Risorgimento,” when Garibaldi led the rebellion that united Italy for the first time since the Roman empire. Lampedusa’s fictional prince is well aware that he is at the end of an era, just as Lampedusa knew he was one of the last remnants of a certain kind of Sicilian nobility. As Fernanda Eberstadt wrote in The New Yorker,  he was “not yet a world-famous author, he was the depressed survivor of a once distinguished family, living with his impossible wife in near-poverty, on the margins of society—a man who had done nothing all his life but sit in cafés and read.”

Reading The Leopard in a time of global crisis, on an island that has been conquered by every empire coveting control of the Mediterranean since the third century B.C., is a layered experience. In the novel, Sicily’s separation from the mainland shelters the island, seen as Italy’s misunderstood, half-forgotten stepchild, from change. When the prince goes into the heart of Palermo one evening, despite the ongoing violence of the Risorgimento, an outmoded respect for nobility allows his carriage to pass through the revolutionary checkpoints. The prince knew how stubborn the past can be, even at its most frail. There is an advantage to isolation and a watery border in times of war and plague. In the early days of the American pandemic, some islands off the coast of America barred the return of their summer interlopers for that very reason. The old ways offer a form of protection, just as physical isolation does.

 I landed in Catania, on the eastern side of the island, and drove south to Ortygia, a medieval “old city” set off from the city of Syracuse by two small bridges. A local told us that the maze of narrow streets provided convenient escape routes from Greek invaders when the siege of Syracuse was lost, a turning point in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. This is how time is reckoned here.

Ortygia is now a tourist destination, a stop for cruise ships disgorging sunburnt travelers, but this was summer 2021, cruises and all-night dance parties were nowhere to be seen. Quickly I became, like Lampedusa, accustomed to my café: on a corner, with tables shaded by red umbrellas, where the waiter, Horacio, an older man with the gentle manner and name of a poet, brought me coffee and a croissant filled with honey and ginger. I arrived after my swim, still in my bathing suit, when the street sweepers were the only other people to be seen. After the first day, I bought a swim cap and goggles, copying the locals, mostly older men, who swam with me off the rocky shore near a walled plaza at the eastern edge of Ortygia. Walking down the road with a beach bag felt like opening the door to a smoke-filled social club, minus the dominoes. Before setting out, I drank tea on a small balcony overlooking the sea, waiting for the middle-aged man who walked the road that circled the island accompanied by a nun in a grey habit. He talked nonstop on his cell phone, simultaneously chaperoning and ignoring her. She watched the fishing boats near the reefs offshore as the sun heaved itself up over a weary horizon. They passed below me every day, I never saw her face.

The Leopard takes place mostly in the main city of Palermo, where Lampedusa himself lived in a run-down family palazzo. His hero, the prince, or Don Fabrizio, is the aging “leopard” of his family crest, though the Italian version of this animal is not what we think of as a leopard, more like a bobcat—the English translation would have made both princes smile. Don Fabrizio’s beloved nephew, Tancredi, is all youth and energy. He represents the new Sicily in the age of Garibaldi, whose “red shirts” Tancredi joins in a relatively bloodless revolution. Sicily welcomes the end of the hapless Bourbon monarchy, but when Rome is declared the new capital and a new king is installed in 1870 the development is greeted with an ironic shrug by the prince. He refuses a delegate who asks him to represent Sicily in the new government as a senator, saying, “I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.” Instead, Don Fabrizio recommends a rapacious member of the nouveau riche, a man who already owns more land than the prince himself and will become not only a senator but Tancredi’s father-in-law—a marriage the prince encourages, not because his nephew has fallen in love with the beautiful daughter but because of his melancholy realpolitik.

Why should we care about fallen Sicilian nobility? I kept asking myself as I the novel drew me in. Who is mourning the last shreds of nineteenth-century feudalism? Change comes too late, then and now, but unlike many of us the prince knows that even by the standards of his own proud island he will never be relevant again. What makes Don Fabrizio modern, and a sympathetic witness for a reader eyeing Sicily from the rubble of the twenty-first century, is that he shares our skepticism. For him there is nothing to mourn, and there is no point in trying to explain this to anyone.

Sicily, with its legacy of conquest and dominion, is, as Eberstadt writes, “always a colony and never a country.” It feeds much of Italy yet faces a possibly cataclysmic future of drought and rising sea levels. I travelled one day into the dry interior, looping past Palermo into the hills to visit a medieval church with a strangely harmonious melange of Byzantine mosaics and Baroque architecture. The church tower looked like a minaret with an iron cross on top, vestige of a golden age when Sicily's Islamic and Judeo-Christian populations influenced and nurtured each other. As I came back down, the courtyard filled with masked women wearing gaudy satin dresses, girls in frilled petticoats, and boys with clip-on ties. The men gathered out around a black limousine, smoking, paper face masks shoved into their suit pockets. There was going to be a wedding, and visitors were ushered out as the church bells began to ring.

The most famous line in The Leopard is “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” As Eberstadt notes, it may also be the most misunderstood. Its speaker Tancredi may mean to be defiant, but Lampedusa is more of a philosopher than that. Weddings and funerals will continue, babies will be born, and the stars and planets Don Fabrizio tracks from his home observatory will make their wheeled progress without regard for our wounded centuries. The prince is comforted by this knowledge, and fully expects that the cycle of revolution through anarchy, republic, and eventually back to monarchy will continue, as he slips his nephew a roll of coins for the revolution.

Like both princes of Lampedusa, we are caught between past and future, but we are facing a more final end. In the time to come there may be no cafés in the drowned cities, the hillside towns emptied of all but the goats and a few well-armed survivors, waiting for a boat to appear over the horizon. Sicily is the island of the Cyclops, where wily Odysseus, refugee from the Trojan War, came ashore, blinded the island’s sole inhabitant, and stole his sheep. It is hard not to think in terms of mythology on this volcanic rock, though it is no more battered now than the rest of the globe. The Leopard may be a distant mirror to our own political mythologies, but it is the humanity of the prince makes it a revealing one. Living at the end of an era, his ease with loss compels us to consider our losses, as the known world walks a high wire between longing and futility.

Please e-join Book Post for a talk with novelist Padgett Powell about why he objects to book reviewing (but writes for us anyway). Under the wings of our current bookstore partner Seminary Co-op, Thursday, December 9, 6:00 pm Central Time. Register here!

A prelude: Padgett Powell, “Eff the Classics”
His new book (including two reviews for Book Post!): Indigo: Arm Wrestling, Snake Saving, and Some Things in Between (we were in between)

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Rebecca Chace is the author of two novels, Leaving Rock Harbor and Capture the Flag; a memoir, Chautauqua Summer; a children's book, June Sparrow and the Million Dollar Penny; as well as plays, screenplays, and nonfiction essays.

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Image: Copy Pantheon’s original edition of The Leopard borrowed by the author from the Center for Fiction library