The Leopard
At school in London one of my favourite lessons was English Literature and I passed my exam with flying colours. Whilst I was studying classics like Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, in Italy the Italian school children would have probably been studying novels like Il Gattopardo. The Leopard ( Il Gattopardo in Italian) is a novel by Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, which chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Unification of Italy. The novel was published posthumously in 1958 after two rejections by leading Italian publishing houses. The Leopard became the top selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 2012, UK newspaper The Guardian named it as one of "The 10 Best Historical Novels". The novel was made into an award winning film of the same name in 1963 directed by Luchino Visconti starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale...