The Leopard follows the decline of the Salinas, a Sicilian noble family, following Italian nationalist General Garibaldi’s revolution in 1861—also called the Risorgimento, or “resurgence.” This movement succeeded in incorporating the historical monarchy of Sicily into a unified Italian state, and it resulted in a decline of the historic nobility and its associated culture. Lampedusa considers this decline both directly, through the reflections of Dom Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, and indirectly, through aspects of Sicilian culture portrayed as superficial. This is especially true of Catholic practices, which (at least among the nobility) reflect social status more than sincere religious belief. Lampedusa suggests that Sicilian culture has primarily been a mode of resisting outside influences and preserving Sicilian identity. And because this culture is isolated, uninterested in the outside world, and therefore stagnant, it fails to improve itself and undercuts its own survival in the long run. Lampedusa argues that when a culture becomes narrowly focused on survival, it becomes insular and loses the ability to adapt to a changing world; the resulting stagnation ends up leading to decline from within instead of self-preservation.
In the effort to preserve itself against outsiders, Sicily has become insular and stagnant. When the Prince is asked to join the new Italian Senate, he explains to the government representative, Chevalley, that Sicilians are their own worst enemy when it comes to reacting to change: “[W]e Sicilians have become accustomed, by a […] hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and who did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys. Now […] we’re made like that.” In other words, because Sicilians have frequently been ruled by outsiders, they’ve have always had to accommodate other cultures. This, the Prince implies, has had a stagnating effect on their own culture. The Prince further suggests that the burden of colonization—the effort to simply survive under outsiders’ rule—has prevented Sicilians from developing their own culture. He laments, “For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. […] I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.” Centuries of living under a succession of foreign conquerors has led to a kind of cultural decay and stagnancy—Sicilians are no longer progressing. The Prince concludes that “this continual tension in everything […] all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction […] their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well […] all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.” Sicilian survival has depended upon managing outsiders’ demands, conforming to those cultures, and enduring oppression. Sicilians have resultantly become weakened and withdrawn; they’re unable to build a culture that can sustain such pressures and are content to keep to themselves instead.
Because Sicilians have been so preoccupied with survival, even surviving cultural institutions like Catholicism become symbols of prestige—they’ve been drained of their underlying meaning. The novel begins and ends with expressions of outward religious devotion that are more about the Salina family’s social position than about faith. After the family finishes their daily recitation of the Rosary, the narrator suggests that religion recedes into the background of life by personifying the figures on the room’s ornate ceiling: “meanwhile the major gods and goddesses, the Princes among gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, […] were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again.” The narrator associates the ancient Roman gods with Prince Fabrizio (“the Princes among gods,” holding his ancestral shield). This association ties the Prince to the region’s ancient history, suggesting that he is an exemplar of its culture. But this also suggests that the Rosary recitation, even if it expresses genuine religious feeling, is an outward gesture that is overshadowed by the Prince’s greater allegiance to Sicily. In other words, the daily ritual, above and beyond its religious significance, helps confirm the Prince’s rootedness in Sicily’s history and reassure the Prince that his status in Sicily will survive. At the end of the novel, when religious authorities determine that the now-elderly Salina daughters’ famous collection of religious relics is largely fake, Concetta Salina’s biggest fear is the accompanying loss of social status: “the Church’s esteem meant much to her. The prestige of her name had slowly disappeared; the family fortune, divided and subdivided, was at best equivalent to that of any number of other lesser families […] But in the Church, in their relations with it, the Salinas had maintained their pre-eminence. […] Would that happen now?” Fifty years after the start of the novel, the Salinas are no longer well-off or respected because of their inherited status alone—but they maintain a reputation as devout Catholics because of their religious objects, which are now proven to be inauthentic. While this doesn’t mean that the family has entirely faked its religious devotion, it does suggest that religious practice has largely been used to reinforce the family’s status over the years, especially as their fortune has dried up. This outward display has proven to be unsustainable, suggesting that the family’s status won’t survive much longer, either. Though the Salinas (and Sicily at large) have used religion as a tool for cultural survival, it has actually undermined the survival of the culture that they hold dear.
Just before his death, the Prince reflects that his family will fail to carry on his noble legacy and that anything distinctive about the Salinas is about to die with him. The Prince’s death also symbolizes the passing away of anything distinctive about the old Sicilian ruling class and, by implication, of Sicilian culture more broadly. Now that Sicily has been absorbed into the unified kingdom of Italy, Lampedusa suggests, its tendency toward insularity and inaction is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rather than protecting Sicilian culture as intended, this tendency has led the country to destroy itself from within.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Cultural Survival and Decline ThemeTracker
Cultural Survival and Decline Quotes in The Leopard
The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke […] the major gods and goddesses, the Princes among gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor deities and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again.
At the bottom of the steps the authorities took their leave, and the Princess […] invited the Mayor, the Archpriest, and the notary to dine that same evening. […] And [the Prince] added, turning to the others, “And after dinner, at nine o’clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends.” For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.
[T]he scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily […] Don Fabrizio and Tumeo […] saw the same objects, their clothes were soaked with just as sticky a sweat, the same indifferent breeze blew steadily from the sea, moving myrtles and broom, spreading a smell of thyme. […] Reduced to these basic elements, its face washed clear of worries, life took on a tolerable aspect.
“In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”
“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. And what is more, as you must have realized by now, I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for wanting to guide others? We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque.
Chevalley thought, “This state of things won’t last; our lively new modern administration will change it all.” The Prince was depressed: “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always,’ of course, a century, two centuries…and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us. Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”
They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.
It was useless to try to avoid the thought, but the last of the Salinas was really he himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families […] the meaning of his name would change more and more to empty pomp […] He had said that the Salinas would always remain the Salinas. He had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi […] had won after all.
To her the removal of those objects was a matter of indifference; what did touch her, the day’s real thorn, was the appalling figure the Salina family would now cut with the ecclesiastical authorities, and soon with the entire city. […] And the Church’s esteem meant much to her. The prestige of her name had slowly disappeared; the family fortune, divided and subdivided, was at best equivalent to that of any number of other lesser families and very much smaller than that of some rich industrialists. But in the Church, in their relations with it, the Salinas had maintained their pre-eminence. What a reception His Eminence had given the three sisters when they went to make their Christmas visit! Would that happen now?
As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.
