Centuries of marauding foreign invaders; poor infrastructure; organised crime networks; high unemployment — hasn’t Sicily suffered enough? Then along comes Netflix’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 classic, The Leopard, to inflict real pain on a region with every right to feel protective of one of its most significant contributions to Italian culture.
It’s not that it was necessarily wrong for the streaming giant to ferret out what’s arguably the best intellectual property Italy has on offer — after all, there’s a limit to how many adaptations of Pinocchio audiences can tolerate. Nor should The Leopard purists object to the addition of new material that fleshes out elements glossed over or not explored in the novel. That’s all par for the Netflix course.
What Sicilians would be entitled to resent is the mischaracterisation the main character: don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. The novel is built around Salina’s worldview; if you get that wrong, nothing else makes much sense in the story’s world.
Despite the novel’s famous and often misunderstood refrain, “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything has to change,” Lampedusa’s Salina has already come to terms with the unstoppable rise of the new mafia-tinged middle class that now holds the money and, with it, the power. He has already surrendered to history. As the Italian expression goes, he’s pulled the oars back on the boat. He’s allowing the current to take him wherever it wants. He has given up.
In the six-part Netflix series, which includes both a padded-out version of the novel’s events and an imagined sequel, Salina is a tough guy desperate to push back. We seem him humiliating the local mafia middleman for stealing baskets of fruit from his properties and then making him an offer he can’t refuse. He appears surprised to discover that power has shifted towards don Calogero Sedara, the corrupt mayor of Donnafugata, the location of the Salinas’ summer estate.
Even the prince’s strong-arm tactics in dealing with the invading garibaldini — the red-shirted soldiers sent by the Turin-based Kingdom of Sardinia to unify Italy — appear to misunderstand the book’s key theme. Lampedusa made clear that Salina saw the unification of Italy simply as political theatre in which Sicilians would know how to play their part. It’s for that reason that Salina doesn’t feel the need to reschedule when the soldiers are advancing on Palermo: his regular visit to the prostitute Mariannina goes ahead.
The message is clear: despite the histrionics of the northern forces, this isn’t a real invasion. The unification of Italy is merely the replacement of one foreign ruler, the Naples-based Bourbon King Francis II, with another, the Piedmontese Victor Emmanuel II. There’s no way Sicily’s nobility would have its routines interrupted while the stagehands change the backdrop.
The Salina of the novel would be the last to know if his employees were pilfering fruit. He’s a man of letters and science, usually holed up in his observatory talking astronomy with his sparring partner, Father Pirrone. He’s already reconciled to the fact that he’s bleeding money to cashed-up commoners, and he has decided not to fight back. As the prince explains, the very sensuality that Sicilians take pride in is nothing but a desire for oblivion — a long, macabre dance with death.
Lampedusa’s Salina tells the reader that the descendants of his Norman ancestors may have been around for centuries but now the game is over. What money they have will be lost within a few generations — namely, the very generation of the book’s author, who preferred to watch his family home crumble around him during the mid twentieth century than suffer the indignity of getting a real job. You can’t write books sipping coffee in Palermo’s Bar Mazzara, around the corner from the magnificent Teatro Massimo, if you need a nine-to-five just to pay for the kids’ tennis lessons.
In the Netflix universe, though, Salina is resisting the nobility’s fading into oblivion. He finds himself wrangling with the new Italian administration for a permit that would let his family spend the summer in Donnafugata. He acts like a bigshot throwing a tantrum rather than a man of letters presiding over his family’s descent into penury. In the horse-trading with the new administration his final and successful gambit is to allow an Italian administrator to get to know his daughter Concetta in return for a pass allowing the family to leave Palermo. The vulgarity of Salina pimping out a family member is unworthy of Lampedusa’s literary creation.
It’s not just that all of this makes little sense. It’s also a profound misreading of what is arguably the most significant Italian novel of the last century.
Another bold Netflix decision is to depict Tancredi, the beloved nephew of Salina, as somehow at odds with his uncle over how to manage the family’s move to history’s next act. In the novel, however, they both know they’ll need a lot more money to maintain their status in the Italian state than Salina can offer. The entire household may be appalled by Tancredi’s marriage to Sedara’s beautiful daughter Angelica, whose maternal grandfather had been so poor he was known in town simply as Pepe Shit, but Salina and Tancredi are on the same page.
For his part, Sedara needs the Salina name as a veneer of respectability, to enable him to continue to acquire land, money and power and become another puppet master in the new Italian state. Yet there’s never any doubt that this is how things must play out. For the first time since their Norman ancestors invaded Sicily in the year 1000, the Salina family is opening its doors to a commoner.
Netflix also offers a backstory for Concetta, a relatively minor character in the novel, and develops her relationship with Tancredi. Readers of the novel know that Concetta’s feelings for Tancredi were never reciprocated — probably not a bad thing, considering they were first cousins. On the small screen, it’s a full-blown story of unrequited love, in which Tancredi opts for Angelica over Concetta out of expedience rather than love.
You can’t blame the writers for wanting to add a modern, feminist twist to the story. They turn the novel’s petulant, plain Concetta into an attractive, erudite and smart on-screen character — the message being that, in a less sexist era and place, she is the only one who could whip the failing family business into shape. Nor should we worry too much when Tancredi’s marriage to Angelica starts to unravel after they head to Turin, the capital of the new Italy, where Salina’s nephew will take on a role in the new administration. We had got a sense of where things were heading in the novel: “A year of passion and thirty years of ashes.”
The series gives the same treatment to Mariannina, the prince’s go-to Palermo prostitute (the title of “prince” is just a noble honorific like any other — it doesn’t suggest Salina is the heir to a throne). In the novel, Mariannina utters just a single word: principone! (“big prince!”). In the Netflix universe, we get her backstory and follow what appears to be a conversion — although it’s hard to imagine a worse fate than the nunnery she appears set to join.
Again, if you’re going to build stories on the margins of the Leopard universe, it may as well be these two characters. The problem is that it’s all a bit clunky and obvious — what the Italians would call telefonato. There’s none of the book’s subtlety. When don Calogero Sedara has had enough of Salina’s condescension, Lampedusa subtly implies the tension; in the series we get an angry confrontation. When Sedara wears black-tie to a function where a dinner suit was required, it’s noted in the novel but not commented on; in the series the prince sends him home to change.
And, of course, Salina in the novel isn’t referred to as “the Leopard.” It’s not a nickname. The title of the book, Il Gattopardo, is a reference to the serval, or leopard, of the family’s coat of arms, and the animal is name-checked in one of the prince’s most famous interior monologues. “We were the leopards, the lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and all of us — leopards, jackals and sheep — we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.” In the series, everyone refers to Salina as “the leopard,” like he was a bejewelled rapper with an aka.
In fairness to the screenplay’s writers, the novel’s subtlety is a hard one problem to solve. Most of the prince’s outlook is delivered through interior monologue, which on screen needs to somehow be put into spoken words. Luchino Visconti’s much-admired 1963 film adaptation had the same problem, with the prince — the American actor Burt Lancaster dubbed with a thick Sicilian accent — having to ham it up to hammer home the novel’s main themes.
When don Calogero Sedara, the prince’s soon-to-be in-law, tells the novel’s Salina that he has “authenticated papers in the drawer” proving he too has noble origins, the prince takes it all in with “repressed laughter.” In Visconti’s film, there’s nothing repressed about the prince’s response — how else could you express to the audience the contempt he has for the suggestion that Salina’s origins could be anything other than that of a peasant. Where the depth of the prince’s social compromise in allowing his nephew to marry a commoner is dealt with in his internal monologue, those having to put the story on the screen need big gestures to explain.
All of this is understandable. Bringing a book so culturally specific to a broader audience requires some fancy footwork and the Netflix series does what’s needed to get the viewer from A to B. But there can be no compromise on the Lampedusa’s broader and far more controversial, almost mystical, vision of Sicily. For him, this is a land impervious to change, ruled by the mafia and other power structures that date back to before the Norman conquest. To skimp on this theme of the novel or, even worse, to counteract it with Salina’s aggressive drive to shape his family’s position in the nascent Italian state, forces us to suspend the disbelief that’s key to understanding and enjoying Lampedusa’s fictional account of one of his ancestors.
The mystical view of Sicily that underpins the novel is also what has made it so controversial. Leonardo Sciascia, whose writing has come to define the island, argued that The Leopard’s description of a society immobilised by its inability to accept change fails to grapple with the real impact of the Risorgimento — the political movement that brought about the unification of Italy.
Today, there’s no shortage of Sicilian writers and thinkers who would agree with that assessment of The Leopard’s deep conservatism. They argue that there’s nothing cultural about, say, the proliferation of organised crime in Sicily, and there’s no genetic predisposition that causes Sicilians to reject change. What the island has lacked, they say, is the presence of strong institutions, adequate law enforcement and economic policies required to draw it in to a modern Italian state. Sicily’s challenges are based in governance shortcomings, not culture.
But to believe this is to reject the very premise of The Leopard, which can only be read as a depiction of a society in which no ruler and no state authority can bring about change. And this is where the Netflix series falters. It’s fine to develop minor characters and examine Concetta’s love life. Even a sequel in which the prince visits Turin doesn’t inherently conflict with the material. What’s truly challenging is to juggle a story based on a premise that nothing changes with a format that requires plot development and characters with their own narrative arcs.
In fact, you could argue that Netflix deserves kudos for giving it a go. Lampedusa’s The Leopard may well be a novel that simply can’t be adapted to the small screen. •
