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Giuseppe Di Lampedusa Biography & Facts

Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, GE (23 December 1896 – 23 July 1957), known as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Italian pronunciation: [dʒuˈzɛppe toˈmaːzi di lampeˈduːza]), was an Italian writer, nobleman, and Prince of Lampedusa. He is most famous for his only novel, Il Gattopardo (first published posthumously in 1958), which is set in his native Sicily during the Risorgimento. A taciturn, solitary, shy, and somewhat misanthropic aristocrat, he opened up only with a few close friends, and spent a great deal of his time reading and meditating. He said of himself as a child, "I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people", and in 1954 wrote, "Of my sixteen hours of daily wakefulness, at least ten are spent in solitude." Biography Tomasi was born in Palermo to Giulio Maria Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, Baron of Torretta, and Grandee of Spain (1868–1934), and Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangieri di Cutò (1870–1946). He was fourth cousin once removed of jeweler Fulco di Verdura and first cousin of poet Lucio Piccolo. He became an only child after the death (from diphtheria) in 1897 of his sister Stefania. He was very close to his mother, a strong personality who influenced him a great deal, especially because his father was rather cold and detached. Although much of the paternal family fortune was lost even before his father's time, and another large portion was tied up in lengthy litigation, they still owned the grand Palazzo Lampedusa in Palermo, which they shared with his paternal grandparents, three bachelor uncles, and a number of servants. This was the main residence of his childhood, although he spent summers and some other periods at the Palazzo Filangeri-Cutò, his mother's family home in rural Santa Margherita di Belice. At first, his education was a bit erratic: on his eighth birthday, he had already learned conversational French but had not yet learned to read or write even his native language. Beginning in the summer of his eighth year he studied in the two family palaces with a tutor (including the subjects of literature and English), with his mother (who taught him French) and with a grandmother who read him the novels of Emilio Salgari. The palace in Santa Marghereta had an excellent library, from which Tomasi soon read voraciously. The palace at Santa Margherita had a small theatre. For two weeks every summer a troupe of traveling players rented the theatre for a nominal fee and put on a different play every night for two weeks. Tomasi saw many performances there; years later he particularly recalled seeing his first performance of Hamlet with an audience composed largely of "illiterate labourers." In March 1911 his mother's younger sister, Princess Julia Trigona, a lady in waiting to Queen Elena, was murdered by her lover Baron Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno. The resulting scandal led the family to spend the summer in Tuscany and the autumn in Rome. That autumn, Tomasi attended the liceo classico in Rome and then continued that curriculum at the liceo in Palermo for roughly three years. In 1914-1915 he was enrolled in the Law Faculty of the University of Genoa, though it is not clear that he actually ever attended. He definitely attended law classes in Rome in early 1915. However that year he was drafted into the army. He served first in the artillery (where he became a corporal), then transferred to the infantry. Beginning in May 1917 he underwent officer training in Turin, and was sent to the front as an officer that September. When the Italians lost the Battle of Caporetto, he was well to the west of the front lines of the main battle, but was taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the chaotic retreat. He was held in a PoW camp near Vienna (and was even allowed a visit to the city at one point). As the war approached its end he succeeded in escaping and returning to Italy. After being mustered out of the army in February 1920 as a lieutenant, he returned to Sicily, where he spent several months in a state of nervous exhaustion. After a few brief attempts at resuming his formal studies, he entered a relatively peripatetic stage of his life. Finding post-War Sicily much less to his taste than pre-War Sicily, he spent time in Genoa, Turin, Tuscany, Bologna and even Munich. While his formal education may have been erratic, Tomasi was a strong, self-driven reader, and had a great facility with languages. Besides a basic knowledge of Latin and Greek obtained in the liceo, he had mastered Italian, French, and German as a child, and English shortly thereafter. Late in life, he would add Spanish, and he also learned some Russian along the way. He read extensively in all of these languages, as well as reading Russian literature in translation. Primarily he read literature and history, though he also read books about art and architecture. His tastes were broad and his reading extensive: he had read all of Shakespeare's works before his first visit to the UK in his twenties; he was almost certainly one of the first Italians to plunge seriously into James Joyce; and he read many minor writers, many of whom he found provided a window into particular times and milieux. Tomasi's uncle Pietro Tomasi Della Torretta was Italian ambassador to the UK from 1922 to 1927. Although Pietro's own politics were liberal conservative, he was a diplomat rather than a politician and continued to serve into Italy's Fascist era until Mussolini ultimately demanded his resignation. Tomasi made numerous long visits to London during his uncle's tenure as ambassador, travelling a good deal within the UK and in France on the way there and back. It was also through his uncle that Tomasi would meet his future wife. Pietro was married to Alice Barbi, who was widow of a Baltic German baron, by whom she had two daughters Olga, nicknamed Lolette, and Alexandra von Wolff-Stomersee (1894–1982), nicknamed "Licy". Little is known of Tomasi's relations with women before his marriage. He was engaged at least twice—once to an English girl, once to an Italian girl—but even the names of these fiancées are unknown, as are the names of his friends and associates in England, including a Scottish girl with whom he once described himself as "infatuated." Tomasi and Licy first met in London in 1925. He visited her at Stāmeriena Palace (Stomersee) in 1927. They met again in Rome in 1930, Stomersee in 1931, and she visited him at Easter 1932 in Palermo. Since 1918, and throughout this period, she remained married to André Pilar, an Estonian baron. Pilar was homosexual, and the terms of the marriage are unclear; Pilar, Licy, and Tomasi all remained close even after the prior couple divorced and Licy married Tomasi. (For that matter, it is not clear whether Tomasi's marriage with Licy had a sexual component, either.) The marriage took place in the Orthodox Annunciation of Our Most Holy Lady Church in.... Discover the Giuseppe Di Lampedusa popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Giuseppe Di Lampedusa books.