Who wrote The Leopard, the novel of Sicily's fading nobility?

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a Sicilian prince who wrote one novel late in life, was rejected by two publishers, and died in 1957 without seeing it printed. It came out the following year and became the best-selling Italian novel of the century.

It carries the line most quoted about political change: everything must change so that everything can stay the same. The book follows an aristocrat watching Garibaldi's unification arrive and understanding, without much emotion, that his class will survive by joining the new order rather than resisting it, and that the revolution will therefore change nothing important. Sicily, he says, does not want to improve because it believes itself already perfect.

The Italian left disliked it intensely on publication - a nostalgic aristocrat's book, they said, and a reactionary account of the Risorgimento. Its reputation survived that, partly on Visconti's 1963 film, whose forty-minute ballroom sequence was shot in real palaces in the Sicilian summer heat. Lampedusa's own palace had been destroyed by American bombing in 1943, which is not incidental to a novel about a house and a family running out.