Post by Bozur on Jul 13, 2008 14:22:33 GMT -5
Sicily, Through the Eyes of the Leopard
Lampedusa’s Sicily
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's "Leopard" is one of Italy's best-loved books and is a window to the island's harsh and dramatic beauty. On Via Maqueda, left, in central Palermo, mountains loom where the city ends.
Published posthumously in 1958, "The Leopard" was Lampedusa's only novel. It details the decline of a noble Sicilian family during in the 1860s. The main character and patriarch, proud Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (based on the author's great-grandfather, Prince Giulio), is called the Leopard after his family crest.
Near Lampedusa's house in Palermo. The city is crammed with exquisite architectural and artistic monuments from every century.
To get a good idea of how the 19th-century Palermitan aristocracy lived, visit the Palazzo Mirto. Inside is a succession of sumptuously decorated rooms.
The palace featured most prominently in "The Leopard" is in a town Lampedusa calls Donnafugata. The author based it on Santa Margherita di Belice, where he spent his idyllic summer holidays in the Palazzo Filangeri-Cutò as a boy. This splendid 18th-century building, which belonged to his mother's family, now houses the Parco del Gattopardo, left, a museum devoted to Lampedusa.
The museum displays manuscripts of "The Leopard" in tidy glass cases, along with foreign editions of the novel and family portraits.
Shepherd, flock and derelict houses in Santa Margherita, which was heavily damaged by an earthquake in 1968.
In "The Leopard," when the Prince is hunting near the fictional Donnafugata, really Santa Margherita, he looks out over the landscape and sees it "aridly undulating to the horizon in hillock after hillock, comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy."
www.nytimes.com/
Lampedusa’s Sicily
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's "Leopard" is one of Italy's best-loved books and is a window to the island's harsh and dramatic beauty. On Via Maqueda, left, in central Palermo, mountains loom where the city ends.
Published posthumously in 1958, "The Leopard" was Lampedusa's only novel. It details the decline of a noble Sicilian family during in the 1860s. The main character and patriarch, proud Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (based on the author's great-grandfather, Prince Giulio), is called the Leopard after his family crest.
Near Lampedusa's house in Palermo. The city is crammed with exquisite architectural and artistic monuments from every century.
To get a good idea of how the 19th-century Palermitan aristocracy lived, visit the Palazzo Mirto. Inside is a succession of sumptuously decorated rooms.
The palace featured most prominently in "The Leopard" is in a town Lampedusa calls Donnafugata. The author based it on Santa Margherita di Belice, where he spent his idyllic summer holidays in the Palazzo Filangeri-Cutò as a boy. This splendid 18th-century building, which belonged to his mother's family, now houses the Parco del Gattopardo, left, a museum devoted to Lampedusa.
The museum displays manuscripts of "The Leopard" in tidy glass cases, along with foreign editions of the novel and family portraits.
Shepherd, flock and derelict houses in Santa Margherita, which was heavily damaged by an earthquake in 1968.
In "The Leopard," when the Prince is hunting near the fictional Donnafugata, really Santa Margherita, he looks out over the landscape and sees it "aridly undulating to the horizon in hillock after hillock, comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy."
www.nytimes.com/