Rent The Leopard

Synopsis

This acclaimed historical novel about a powerful man, the prince of an ancient Sicilian family, caught between the old world and the new order is set in Sicily at the time of Garibaldi, when Italy’s future was at stake. Don Fabrizio clings to the old feudal order, but, under the influence of Tancredi, his beloved nephew, he finds himself succumbing to new ways of thinking and of living. Don Fabrizio is a cultured, learned, proud man who, as he grows older, struggles to accept the facts of death and change. Tancredi is a man of the future; his role is symbolized by his marriage to the daughter of a middle-class parvenu--a union which, ironically, Don Fabrizio is called upon to arrange. The novel ends with his death in 1888, but, in an epilogue set in 1910, his three spinster daughters clear out many of the old relics from the family mansion, and we see that the transformation of Italy is complete--the old world is finally, irrevocably, dead. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa died shortly before the publication of THE LEOPARD in 1958, when it became a sensational best-seller in Italy and abroad. The novel was made into a monumental movie in 1963, directed by Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio and Alain Delon as Tancredi.

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