The Leopard Analysis

It's little wonder why Giuseppe di Lampedusa decided to set this book during the Italian "Risorgimento" or "The Resurgence," since this was the process that stripped Lampedusa's own family of its r...

The narrator of The Leopard is most likely Giuseppe di Lampedusa himself. But instead of making this obvious and saying "I" like a first-person narrator, Giuseppe decides to play god and to write i...

Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote this book because he wanted to preserve some record of the past. He was actually the descendant of a long line of Sicilian princes, so he based the characters in this bo...

Giuseppe di Lampedusa can't help but write passionately about the history of his own family. But that doesn't mean he wishes he could go back in time and bring them back. In fact, one of the things...

Well for starters, it's important to know that we're reading a translation of a book that was original written and published in Italian, so the style we end up with in English is part-Lampedusa, pa...

The Leopard is the official symbol of the House of Salina, the aristocratic family whose decline is really the main focus of this book. On several occasions, the book even compares its main charac...

During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant, in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in...

Lampedusa's prose is pretty readable, but it's also dense. He likes to turn every thing he writes into a symbol, and this can often result in slow, tough reading. If you're just looking for plot, y...

Prince FabMeet Prince Fabrizio di Salina, a large moody guy who realizes that his family's royal history is coming to an end. Foreign troops are about to absorb his home island of Sicily into the n...

The Leopard might not be what you think of as a typical tragedy, with all of the bloody battles and unfortunate coincidences. But it does align with the definition of tragedy: and has a hero that f...

Prince Fabrizio sits down with his family for dinner. He's in ill humor because he knows his status as a royal prince is going to disappear once foreign troops invade his country and unify Sicily w...

Did you know that The Leopard never got published in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's lifetime? Publishers rejected it. Now it's the top-selling Italian novel of all time. How's that for poetic justice? (So...

What's a story about an overindulgent aristocratic family without a little steam now and then? Early in the book, Prince Fabrizio stands up in the middle of dinner and announces that he's going to...

Socrates (5.21)Giuseppe Garibaldi (1.133).The Allied Invasion of Sicily (6.31).Napoleon III (5.8)Victor Emmanuel II (4.18).Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin (4.6)