So I recently finished reading The Leopard (or Il Gattpardo as it’s known in Italian), the great but sadly one-and-only novel written by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. The book was originally published in 1958, exactly one year after the author’s death, and it is well-known today primarily for serving as the basis for Luchino Visconti’s opulent, Burt Lancaster-starring film version from 1963. To anyone with an interest in the movie — and you should be interested in it (although if you’ve not yet seen it you may want to bone up on reading about Garibaldi, the Risorgimento and 19th century Italian history in general over at Wikipedia first) — I would also recommend checking out the source novel: it will help you to understand the soul of the Sicilian people. Catholic hypocrisy, class differences, aging machismo, an elegy for the dying aristocracy, etc. All of that and more comes to life in Lampedusa’s beautiful and vivid prose.
I must admit, however, that one very curious sentence in the book caught me completely off-guard — a startling cinematic reference that the author casually drops into the middle of a scene taking place in 1860 when most of the novel’s action is set. Lampedusa describes the elation of Angelica (the character played by Claudia Cardinale in the movie) upon being asked to marry Tancredi (the character played by Alain Delon) by his uncle, the Prince of Salina (Lancaster’s character):
After this Angelica blushed, took half a step back: ‘I’m so happy . . .,’ then came close again, stood on tiptoe, and murmured into his ear, ‘Uncle mine!’; a highly successful line, comparable in its perfect timing almost to Eisenstein’s baby carriage, and which, explicit and secret as it was, set the Prince’s simple heart aflutter and yoked him to the lovely girl forever.
While one might expect this kind of surprising anachronistic metaphor from, say, Thomas Pynchon (who deliberately and hilariously peppers his “period” novels with this sort of thing), it is the only such 20th century reference that I’m aware of in Lampedusa’s entire novel — at least until the brief epilogue, which flashes-forward to 1910 (and that’s still 15 years before Eisenstein’s movie was made). As incongruous as it may seem, however, I think Lampedusa does have a point: Sergei Eisenstein’s baby carriage shots are perfectly placed within the Odessa steps massacre montage towards the end of Battleship Potemkin. One might even say that they serve as the climax of the film’s climax. The great Russian director, who edited his movies with almost mathematical precision, certainly knew a thing or two about timing — as did Lampedusa and, for that matter, Visconti.
Both Battleship Potemkin and The Leopard are available in high-quality restored editions on Blu-ray and DVD, the former via Kino and the latter via Criterion (the Blu-ray of which is the greatest shit evah). My copy of The Leopard, the novel, was published by Pantheon Books in 2007 and translated by one Archibald Colquhoun.
White City Cinema 
May 23rd, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Modern Italian
May 27th, 2016 at 10:22 am
I stumbled across your blog post while searching the internet to see if anyone else found the reference to Eisenstein curious. I found it jarring myself. In the midst of this intimate moment I’m envisioning a baby carriage bouncing down the Odessa steps. And if you don’t get the reference you’re left scratching your head, I suppose. Either way, it stops the reader dead in his tracks.
September 30th, 2017 at 11:01 pm
Hello!
The Leopard is my favorite novel, and di Lampedusa is my favorite author, so I like to look up things relating to him online, which is how I stumbled upon this blog post. I do recall another line in the Leopard which has an anachronistic reference.
“A first reading of this extraordinary composition made Don Fabrizio’s head spin: once again he noted how astoundingly fast all
this had gone; put in modern terms, he could be said to be in the state of mind of someone today who thinks he has boarded one of
the old planes which potter between Palermo and Naples, and suddenly finds himself shut inside a super jet and realizes he will be
at his destination almost before there will be time to make the sign of the Cross.”
June 20th, 2019 at 4:48 pm
There are other 20th century references in the novel:
Chapter Three
“A first reading of this extraordinary composition made Don Fabrizio’s head spin: once again he noted how astoundingly fast all this had gone; put in modern terms, he could be said to be in the state of mind of someone today who thinks he has boarded one of the old planes which potter between Palermo and Naples, and suddenly finds himself shut inside a super jet and realises he will be at his destination almost before there will be time to make the sign of the Cross.”
And perhaps most famously:
Chapter Six
“From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943.”
I would also suggest that it is well known today on its own terms, and not because of Visconti’s film: millions of copies have been sold (forty years after publication still reportedly over 100,000 copies each year) and it consistently features in lists of the greatest books ever written.