The Leopard

The Leopard is a historical novel by the Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, known in Italian as Il Gattopardo, published posthumously in 1958 after the author's death the previous year. Set in Sicily during the period of Italian unification in the 1860s, the novel follows Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, as he watches the aristocratic world he belongs to decline and give way to a rising middle class amid the political upheaval of the Risorgimento. The novel was highly celebrated on publication and won the Strega Prize in 1959, and it is regarded as one of the most important Italian novels of the twentieth century for its portrait of a ruling class conscious of, and resigned to, its own historical obsolescence.