It’s impossible to overstate the impact that fiction can have on the mythology of a nation. What would our understanding of British history look like, were it not for the record Shakespeare left of our late medieval kings? How would we think of the French Revolution without Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or the American Civil War without Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage? These works record history, but they also shape it – and that role is played, in the great unified nation of Italy, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard, which arrives on our screens this week as a lavish Netflix miniseries.
Italy, in the second half of the 19th century, is on the brink of binding together its disparate nations, under the stewardship of General Garibaldi. Sicily, the island being kicked by the boot of the peninsula, has long been its own master, and is governed, internally, by its aristocracy, not least Don Fabrizio (Kim Rossi Stuart), Prince of Salina, known to all as The Leopard. But his standing in Palermo is unsettled by the arrival of Garibaldi’s “red shirts”, not least when his feckless but beloved nephew Tancredi (Saul Nanni) enlists with the rebels. As Sicily falls under the spell of the nationalists, undertaking a project known as the Risorgimento, from the Italian for “resurgence”, the way of life long enjoyed by the Salina dynasty is threatened.
