Ghosts of the Belle Époque by Andrew Edwards & Suzanne Edwards

Author:Andrew Edwards & Suzanne Edwards [Edwards, Andrew Edwards & Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

5

La Dolce Vita

In 1954, as Palermo raced towards a self-destructive modernity, a man from another era sat at his desk in Via Butera crafting, in miniscule handwriting, his only significant contribution to the world of literature. The man in question favoured a thin moustache, emulating that of his ancestors. His habitual attire was a woollen suit, often worn with a waistcoat despite the island’s punishing heat. The final flourish would be either a patterned bow tie or a simple tie but rarely an open-necked shirt. This disciplined apparel reflected both his aristocratic origins and his resolutely old-fashioned outlook.

We are, of course, referring to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), author of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). Lampedusa was the last in a long family line of Sicilian nobles whose ancestry can with certainty be traced back to twelfth-century Tuscany and perhaps even further to the Imperial Guard of Tiberius. Like so many of his class, Lampedusa did not have to earn a living but was able to follow his passions in life. A man of few words, painfully shy and content in the company of selected close friends, he preferred to immerse himself in literature. In the hours of his everyday solitude, he would read avidly, eventually deciding to impart some of his knowledge to those in his intimate literary circle including Francesco Orlando, who would later become a critic and essayist and Gioacchino Lanza, the young cousin he would eventually adopt as his son.

It was a trip to San Pellegrino Terme in northern Italy during the spring of 1954 that finally kick-started Lampedusa’s latent desire to write for public consumption. His cousin, the poet Lucio Piccolo, had been invited to San Pellegrino for a literary conference and took Lampedusa along for moral support. Piccolo was presented as a protégé of the poet and writer Eugenio Montale despite the fact that he was of a similar age. Lampedusa, realising that his cousin could make an impact irrespective of his advancing years, decided to put pen to paper himself.

The process of completing The Leopard was rather laboured. David Gilmour, in his biography The Last Leopard, points out that Lampedusa was as used to writing in French as he was in Italian. When his Latvian wife, Licy, was on one of her frequent visits to the Baltic coast, he would always write to her in French, their shared language of choice. As Gilmour notes, the fact he had to focus intently when writing in Italian may account for the carefully crafted phraseology and imagery present in the book. The majority of the text was either written at home in Via Butera or at the Caffè Mazzara off Via Ruggiero Settimo, a rather odd choice, given the plain concrete exterior of the building. Sadly, the Mazzara has recently closed its doors forever.

Two years later, at the start of 1956, Lampedusa was still struggling with his novel. The fifty-nine-year-old aristocrat had sidelined the text by dabbling with an autobiography which he was never to finish but,

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