Feltrinelli - il Gattopardo del 1963

The famous film The Leopard was made in 1963. Directed by the filmmaker Luchino Visconti, it is based on the eponymous novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The masterpiece is renowned for its stellar cast, which includes Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale, as well as for having won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

A splendid photo of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard
Dimensions 70 cm x 50 cm

The Leopard was the literary sensation of 1959: it won the Strega Prize and sold in just a few months over 100,000 copies. The Leopard gained international resonance, at a time when Italian novels hardly crossed national borders. The protagonist of the novel is the Prince of Salina, the Leopard, who in the moment of Sicily’s transition from the Bourbon regime to the Kingdom of Italy watches the change and the new with skepticism. It provoked lively discussions: those like Eugenio Montale, who saw in the novel a “sense of existence that is at once stoic and deeply charitable,” were opposed by the left-leaning critics, who emphasized the protagonist’s misoneism, intimately tied to a reactionary ideology. The director Luchino Visconti, who in 1963 amplified the novel’s success with his film adaptation, captured in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s work the critique of political transformism and the awareness of death, even of one’s own social class, that pervades the Prince of Salina.