How The Leopard changed its spots by Griselda Heppel
I’m finally getting round to a book I should have read long ago. It’s one of the world’s great classics and I’m slightly embarrassed not to have tackled it before, especially as so many people have told me how brilliant it is. Set in Sicily in1861, The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is a powerful account of the Italian Risorgimento through the eyes of Prince Fabrizio Salina, whose coat of arms provides the book’s title. But rather than a blood and thunder depiction of Garibaldi’s arrival with his 1000 Redshirts, followed by the collapse of the Bourbon royal forces under his swift onslaught, the narrative concentrates on the effects such huge social and political upheaval had on the Sicilian class system, still largely unchanged since feudal times. Accustomed to a power over household, lands and the local populace that Henry VIII - no slouch himself when it came to autocracy No slouch to autocracy: Henry VIII - might have envied, Prince Fabrizio finds h...