Description of the course

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously-published novel (1958) recounting the southern perspective of Italy’s unification (1861) is an elegiac tale of a way of life in transition. The Leopard elucidates better than any work of historiography the key questions of Italian unification, and puts forward in novel form Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation about the shift from aristocracy to democracy in Democracy in America: “Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; […] Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it” (Democracy in America, vol. 2, ch. 2).

Will protagonist Don Fabrizio, patriarch of the House of Salina, remain the aristocratic “Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina”, or will he become, in a new, democratic Italy, simply “Mr. Corbera”? Is Italian unification a true union or is it an imposition, even an invasion? What will be the role of the Church in a united Italy whose founders, observes the Jesuit priest Padre Pirrone in Part V of the novel, “won’t even leave us eyes with which to weep”? We will explore these questions and more in a six-part course on one of the Italian tradition’s most important works.