Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Tomasi was born in Palermo to Giulio Maria Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, Baron of Torretta, and Grandee of Spain (1868–1934), and Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangieri di Cutò (1870–1946). He was fourth cousin once removed of jeweler Fulco di Verdura and first cousin of poet Lucio Piccolo. He became an only child after the death (from diphtheria) in 1897 of his sister Stefania. He was very close to his mother, a strong personality who influenced him a great deal, especially because his father was rather cold and detached. Although much of the paternal family fortune was lost even before his father's time, and another large portion was tied up in lengthy litigation, they still owned the grand Palazzo Lampedusa in Palermo, which they shared with his paternal grandparents, three bachelor uncles, and a number of servants. This was the main residence of his childhood, although he spent summers and some other periods at the Palazzo Filangeri-Cutò, his mother's family home in rural Santa Margherita di Belice.
At first, his education was a bit erratic: on his eighth birthday, he had already learned conversational French but had not yet learned to read or write even his native language. Beginning in the summer of his eighth year he studied in the two family palaces with a tutor (including the subjects of literature and English), with his mother (who taught him French) and with a grandmother who read him the novels of Emilio Salgari. The palace in Santa Marghereta had an excellent library, from which Tomasi soon read voraciously. The palace at Santa Margherita had a small theatre. For two weeks every summer a troupe of traveling players rented the theatre for a nominal fee and put on a different play every night. Tomasi saw many performances…

Tomasi did little public writing before the last few years of his life. He maintained a commonplace book (mostly in French, but also with passages in English and Italian; this appears to have been compiled mainly in the 1920s) and a laconic diary in which he often noted where he visited, what films he saw, etc.; in 1926-1927 he published three articles of literary criticism in Le Opere e i Giorni, a little magazine associated with Gabriele D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello. He also wrote, but made no attempt to publish, several other short pieces about literature. He took photographs when he travelled, but none of them rose above the level of tourist snapshots.
In the mid-1950s he wrote extensive notes (not originally intended for publication) on European literature, including a 1000-page critical history of English literature from Bede to Graham Greene.
His novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard ) follows the family of its title character, the Sicilian nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, through the events of the Risorgimento. Perhaps the most memorable line in the book is spoken by Don Fabrizio's nephew, Tancredi, urging unsuccessfully that Don Fabrizio abandon his allegiance to the disintegrating Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and ally himself with Giuseppe Garibaldi and the House of Savoy: "Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they'll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change", an approach to politics that has become known as the di Lampedusa strategy. The point-of-view character, Don Fabrizio, explicitly rejects this view, and despite the name "di Lampedusa strategy" there is little reason to think the author himself endorsed it.
The title is rendered in English as The Leopard, but the Italian word gattopardo…

Tomasi's political views are not easily pigeonholed. He was a self-declared monarchist who declined the Monarchist National Party's request that he offer his candidacy in 1948 for the Italian Senate and actively chose not to join that party; he was generally critical of both the Bourbon monarchs who had ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and their successors, the Savoyard monarchs who ruled the Kingdom of Italy. His dissent from the typical views one would expect of a monarchist was even more dramatic in some matters not affecting Sicily: he preferred Oliver Cromwell to Charles II and the Jacobins to Louis XVI, of whom he wrote that no one in history had more deserved to have his head cut off.
Tomasi despised Sicilian liberals as corrupt and ineffective (though he had at least a grudging admiration for British liberals) and initially admired the Italian fascists, though he never particularly threw in his lot with them and was away from Italy more during the fascist era than at any other time. In the 1950s, he referred to one of Mussolini's works as an "encyclopaedia of ignorance and conceit." He was sympathetic to the Jansenists and to English Catholics such as Graham Greene, one of his favorite contemporary writers, but also to the English Puritans; the poet John Milton was another of his favorites.
As remarked above, when Tancredi in The Leopard says, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change," there is no reason to believe that he is speaking for the author. Tomasi's pessimism about Sicily, and his regret over what he sees as his homeland's corruption and "irredeemability" is tempered by a sense of its grandeur. As for the causes of Sicilian "irredeemability," the novel spreads the blame widely. The Savoyard Piedmontese are presented as…

The main-belt asteroid 14846 Lampedusa is named after him.
On the occasion of the 14th edition of the Rome Film Festival, the docufilm Die Geburt des Leoparden, directed by Luigi Falorni, was screened. A journey to discover the life of the last Prince of Lampedusa told by the voices and testimonies of loved ones.
In 2019 Canadian novelist Steven Price published a novelized biography of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa entitled Lampedusa.