Letters from London and Europe

The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the 20th century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, and Berlin). The letters display much of Lampedusa's distinctive style present in his later work; not only the razor-sharp introspection, but also a wicked sense of humor, playful in its description of the com die humaine. United and underpinned by the genre of the novel, Lampedusa's lifetime obsession, some letters also read like excerpts from a Stendhalian travel journal, while others are adventures populated with comic, exaggerated personalities.