The Leopard begins with an ending, the rosary’s concluding words: “now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” The novel’s “now” is May 1860, a moment that inaugurates the slow death of Sicily’s old order, inscribed in the fate of the Salina family. Tinged with a lurid sense of beauty ripening into near rot, the scene of action moves between Palermo and the crumbling Salina palace of Donnafugata. We are presented with a floral luxuriance afflicted by the yellow taint of lichen and fleshy cabbages that reek of “the thigh of a dancer from the Opera”. In Donnafugata, the charismatic but destitute prince’s foster nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, resolves to marry Angelica, the stunning daughter of Mayor Don Calogero, thereby ensuring finances for his political ambitions, but also frustrating the romantic aspirations of Concetta, Don Fabrizio’s eldest daughter.
Despite the novel’s momentum, Lampedusa’s sun-stricken Sicily seems to have fallen into a sleep which knows no progress. The island’s splendour, with its bays, cliffs and woods, its citrus groves and baroque towns, is limped by the infernal heat that reigns for six months a year. But a revolution, embodied by Garibaldi’s redshirts and their fight for a unified Italy, is about to dash all rest.
Lampedusa’s swansong has a far more universal reach than you’d realise from the common misinterpretation of it as a conservative wish to preserve upper-class dominance. What is mourned in the novel is the undoing of the very reality that birthed Lampedusa himself, and whose obsolescence therefore mirrors his own. The Leopard vents a disquiet with mortality—though it is not above comedic turns. Instead, precisely at its points of greatest drama, the narrative is capable of such droll absurdity that readers can’t mistake their cue to laugh. In one of the novel’s most touching moments, Don Fabrizio beholds life’s ebbing with a clarity tragically unmatched by his power to hold on. But just as he’s about to cross to the other side, the passage’s lyricism plummets into bathos: after concluding that only three of his 73 years were truly lived, Don Fabrizio imagines being greeted by a woman “chaste but ready for possession”.
Released last week, Netflix’s adaptation of The Leopard is rather more earnest. The chief perspective in this case is not Don Fabrizio’s, but his daughter Concetta’s, played by Benedetta Porcaroli. With the exception of Angelica, the women of the novel are largely martyr figures, flattened under the rule of the pater familias—whose heavy frame flatters his own belief in “his lordship over both humans and their works”. Netflix’s modernised drama fills out these women at the same time as it slims down Don Fabrizio in more ways than one. The new Concetta neither shrinks from mocking her father’s inconsistencies nor from pursuing her love for Tancredi—she has, in short, very little of the reticence of her literary twin. Played by Astrid Meloni, Concetta’s mother, Maria-Stella, commands respect, sympathy, even admiration—all but the ridicule evoked by the book’s portrayal of a highly strung woman-child who feels the compulsion to recite an “Ave Maria” after every embrace with her husband. Most tellingly, while in the novel Don Calogero’s wife features only through a game of whispers that paints her as a wild, illiterate creature whom her husband allows nobody to meet—partly because she is considered unpresentable to high society and partly in order to conceal her beauty from other men’s eyes—in the series the veil falls to reveal the face of Donna Bastiana (Simona Distefano) in full glory.
The show’s adjustments come at the expense of the book’s mordant ironies and historical realism
These adjustments confer greater humanity on the female characters, but do so at the expense of the book’s mordant ironies and historical realism. Donna Bastiana’s absence in the novel illustrates the nullifying power of the padre padrone, which could make a woman literally invisible. Likewise, the poignancy of Concetta’s original story lies precisely in its not being based on the declarations of love contrived in the TV adaptation, but in her mistaking Tancredi’s flirting for sincerity. What makes the resentment that defines her whole, small life the more pitiful are its roots in a never-verbalised longing, like that of many modesty-bound Sicilian women in the 19th century.
Meanwhile, the book’s ridicule of Maria-Stella is really a slight on the cloistered environment that produced her—one that educated women just enough to read devotional texts and excel in the roles of wife, mother and hostess. Only once in the book does Stella shake off her nervous submissiveness in daring to complain to her husband that Tancredi is a double traitor, for having joined Garibaldi’s troops and for choosing Angelica over Concetta. When Don Fabrizio explodes in tyrannical rage, Stella goes into raptures at “having for a husband a man so vital and so proud”. Yet Don Fabrizio’s anger is only a pretence, in obeisance to what is expected of him: “The hater of shouting was himself bawling with all the breath in his great chest. Thinking he had a table in front of him, he banged a great fist on his knee, hurt himself and calmed down too.”
Equally muddied in the TV adaptation is the prominence of religion, belied by Concetta’s aversion to convent life and the ribald mocking of Father Pirrone, the family chaplain. In the novel, the women’s ascetic devotion—which, in the end, will transform the Salina palace into a shrine full of saint relics—is real and significant, and only in contrast with this puritanism can Don Fabrizio’s carnal sins be viewed as something more than just the transgressions of a lecherous old prig. All this is regrettably lost in the Netflix adaptation, producing something more palatable but less true. It smooths over the rough edges of a reality in which social roles mastered even the masters and women found reassurance in oppression—edges which, though uncomfortable, still hold great psychological interest.
Magnified, instead of lost, is the presentation of a momentous point of Italy’s history. An original sequence depicting a group of Garibaldinis—including a child—being executed as the townspeople are forced to watch sheds light on a brutal conflict that the novel’s drawing-room perspective neglects. Through brilliant performances by Francesco Colella, as a most obsequious Don Calogero, and Deva Cassel, as a grasping Angelica, the show skilfully conveys the vertigo-inducing speed of this world’s transformation, driven not just by a desire for freedom but also by human greed, as the emerging bourgeoisie proves just as exploitative as the aristocracy it is due to replace (only less well-mannered).
But if that is reason enough to give the TV adaptation a go, I hope it is even more of a reason to dive into the novel. Lampedusa’s triumph is so consummate that it makes any other versions superfluous.
