ONE OF GIUSEPPE DI LAMPEDUSA’s earliest memories can be dated to 30 July 1900, when he was three and a half. He was sitting on the floor while his mother was at her dressing table, brushing her hair with the help of her Piedmontese maid Teresa, when his father rushed into the room with some dramatic news. Giuseppe remembered his mother dropping her long-handled silver brush, Teresa exclaiming ‘Good Lord!’ in Piedmontese, and the consternation in the room. Later he was told that Don Giulio had been announcing the assassination of King Umberto.31
From that same period Giuseppe recalled staying with the Florio family on the island of Favignana. One morning he was woken earlier than usual by his Sienese nanny, dressed up in smart clothes and taken out on to the veranda. Among a group of people in cane chairs ‘sat a very old, very bent lady with an aquiline nose, enwrapped in widow’s weeds which were waving wildly about in the wind’. She bent towards Giuseppe, said something which he did not understand, and kissed him on the forehead with the words ‘Quel joli petit!’ In the afternoon it was explained that the old lady was Eugénie, the widow of Napoleon III, whose yacht was anchored close by. Having dined with the Florios the previous evening, the former empress had decided to pay them a farewell visit at seven the next morning, during which she had inconveniently asked to meet the children.32
Lampedusa recalled these incidents in the summer of 1955, two years before his death. He had been rereading Stendhal’s autobiography, Vie de Henry Brulard, and was much impressed by its ‘immediacy of feeling’ and ‘obvious sincerity’. It was ‘a remarkable attempt to shovel away accumulated memories and reach the essence’ and had a quality of memory Lampedusa regretted he could not match. Stendhal seemed to remember everything about his childhood, particularly the episodes when he was bullied and tyrannised, whereas for Lampedusa childhood was a period when everyone was good to him and he was ‘king of the home’. Looking back at the age of fifty-eight past a life that had been vexatious, disappointing and often pathetic, he recalled his infancy as ‘a lost Earthly Paradise’.33
Giuseppe’s childhood was based at the Lampedusa home, that vast palace in the middle of Palermo in an area mostly ‘crawling with hovels and wretchedness’. It was the main anchor to his life for nearly fifty years: shortly before its destruction in 1943 he was still sleeping in the bedroom in which he had been born. As the only child living in the palace, it was
a real kingdom for a boy alone, a kingdom either empty or sparsely populated by figures unanimously well-disposed … I was its absolute master and would run continually through its vast expanses, climbing the great staircase from the courtyard to the loggia on the roof, from which could be seen the sea and Monte Pellegrino and the whole city as far as Porta Nuova and Monreale.34
Lampedusa’s memories of the palace were often sensual. He recalled forgotten smells, of his grandparents’ kitchen or the violets in his mother’s dressing room, felt again the polished leather in the saddle rooms, remembered the stuffiness of the stables. He could picture too the contrasting styles of the many rooms: the great hall flagged in white and grey marble, the ballroom frescoes of mythological scenes packed with ‘all the deities of Olympus’, or the ceiling of his mother’s boudoir ‘scattered with flowers and branches of old coloured stucco’. Lampedusa was always sensitive to the quality of light. Describing the ‘perspective of drawing rooms extending one after the other for the length of the facade’, he recalled
the magic of light, which in a city with so intense a sun as Palermo is concentrated or variegated according to the weather, even in narrow streets. The light was sometimes diluted by the silk curtains hanging before balconies, or heightened by beating on some gilt frame or yellow damask chair which reflected it back; sometimes, particularly in summer, these rooms were dark, yet through the closed blinds filtered a sense of the luminous power that was outside; or sometimes at certain hours a single ray would penetrate straight and clear as that of Sinai, populated with myriads of dust particles and going to vilify the colours of carpets, uniformly ruby-red throughout all the drawing rooms: a real sorcery of illumination and colour which entranced my mind for ever. Sometimes I rediscover this luminous quality in some old palace or church, and it would wrench at my heart were I not ready to brush it aside with some wicked joke. 35*
Giuseppe grew up in a world populated by domestic servants and adult relations. In one wing of the piano nobile he lived with his parents; in the other were the apartments of his paternal grandparents. On the floor above lived his bachelor uncles until their quarrels with his father Giulio forced them to leave. In the memoirs of his childhood Giuseppe recalled little of his grandparents except that until his schooldays he spent the afternoons reading in their apartments. ‘At five o’clock my grandfather would call me into his study to give me my afternoon refreshment – a hunk of hard bread and a large glass of cold water.’ The elderly Prince Giuseppe was a dull, conventional man, though he had the un-Sicilian habit of keeping a diary. Unluckily, one of the few things recorded of him is that he had malodorous feet and on that account was known to some people as ‘Piedifitusi’.36 His ten-volume diaries reveal that he lived a dreary life, based on undeviating routines in which horse-riding and religious services were prominent.37 In The Leopard there is a strong hint of his dullness in the character of Don Fabrizio’s eldest son Paolo. His wife Stefania, however, was a more interesting and sympathetic person who used to read poetry and sometimes even wrote it. She evidently got on well with her grandson and one of her letters, thanking him for writing and for not forgetting her in old age, survives.
Giuseppe seems to have had little real affection for any of the male members of his father’s family except for his uncle Pietro, who spent nearly all of these years at the Italian embassy in St Petersburg. His other uncles were familiar but not important figures in his life. One made a rash marriage, left the palace and was ostracised by most of the family. Another had tuberculosis and went to live on the family estate at Torretta where mafioso elements forced him to marry a sheep-farmer’s daughter. The third, Francesco, had a brief military career followed by a more glamorous one on the fringes of the Belle Epoque society in which, according to one observer, he ‘flitted from one flirtation to another without attaching himself closely to anyone’.38 He formed part of the circle around Vincenzo Florio, the millionaire pioneer of motor-car racing in Sicily, and a photograph shows them both in semi-fancy dress, Francesco with cigar, tweed cap and a bow-tie.39 Like the other male Lampedusas of this period, he had a moustache and large bulging eyes. Yet he was considered a fashionable man about Palermo: another photograph, taken at La Favorita races, portrays him as a sort of Sicilian Burlington Bertie with a straw boater and a carnation in his buttonhole. Later he married Angela Santucci, a tempestuous lady from the Romagna with an appetite for quarrels. Years later Giuseppe recalled an ink-spattered carpet in the drawing-room of the Palazzo Lampedusa, the consequence of an inkpot hurled from her apartment on the floor above. After their expulsion from the house, the couple made an attempt to live with their solitary child in the ruined castle at Montechiaro.40
The most difficult member of the family was Giuseppe’s father, the Duke of Palma. He was more intelligent than his three younger brothers but led an equally indolent life. There was not much in common between Don Giulio and his son, who recorded little about him in his memoirs except that he had an ‘infallible eye’ in matters of equestrianism and that he drove four-horse teams ‘with mastery to race-meetings at La Favorita’. He was a man of fashion, a fine horseman and a regular attender at Palermo’s aristocratic club, the Circolo Bellini. Arrogant, sharp-tongued and autocratic, he spent much of his life quarrelling with relations over money. Embittered by his financial misfortune, he retained an exaggerated sense of family and personal pride: in spite of the impoverishment of the Lampedusas and his own dependence on his wife’s money, Don Giulio refused to forgive his brothers for their ‘low’ marriages.
Giuseppe’s mother was a very different character, although she too could be domineering and caustic. Beatrice Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangeri di Cutò was one of five sisters brought up in a far more enlightened and European way than the five Lampedusa brothers. On her eleventh birthday her mother gave her a number of large leather-bound volumes in which for several years Beatrice conscientiously recorded her Palermitan childhood, days divided into periods of study, play, music lessons and carriage drives that might have been modelled on the novels of Jane Austen.41 Photographs of her as an adult depict an attractive, clever and strong-willed face. She impressed contemporaries with her intelligence, and long after her death it was rumoured in her family’s country district that she was the real author of The Leopard and that her son had merely found and corrected the manuscript.42 Yet she was also a highly fashionable woman, who shocked Giuseppe’s great-aunts with her modish clothes, and her company and conversation were found exhilarating in society drawing rooms.43
Until her death in 1946, Beatrice Palma was the most important figure in Giuseppe’s life. Their relationship was extraordinarily close, even for Sicilian society where the bond between mother and son is unusually strong. She retained an overpowering, almost smothering influence over Giuseppe until long after his marriage at the age of thirty-five. As the birth of her only boy coincided with the death of her only daughter, she may afterwards have managed partially to conflate the two children. Giuseppe became the sole object of her adoration but in her eyes may have retained some of the characteristics of his sister. Perhaps that explains why sometimes she addressed him in her letters, even when he was a soldier in the First World War, in the feminine.44
The best of Giuseppe’s childhood in Palermo was spent in the Palazzo Lampedusa with his dog, and that is the part that he later recalled. But he also had to endure a busy social life which he did not enjoy and tried to forget. A cousin, Fulco di Verdura, remembered him as ‘fat and taciturn with big, sad eyes, ill at ease in the open air, timid with animals’.45 Verdura was not always a reliable witness (judging from contemporary photographs, the adjective ‘fat’ is an exaggeration), but the impression of a shy, reticent child who did not play games with other children is correct. From an early age Giuseppe was happiest with books and later described himself as ‘a boy who loved solitude, who liked the company of things more than of people’.46
Perhaps he was unlucky to grow up during the most fashionable decade of Palermo’s history. At the turn of the century the city’s exotic, partly oriental character appealed greatly to the royal families of northern Europe, and a procession of princes and grand-dukes turned up in their yachts. Among the regular visitors were the Kaiser, King Victor Emmanuel, Edward VII and Alexandra, as well as flocks of Balkan and Scandinavian royalty. The power of the Sicilian nobility had been largely destroyed over the previous eighty years but an aristocratic remnant in Palermo survived to welcome the visitors. About twenty of the great palaces were still inhabited by their owners (compared to two hundred a century earlier)47 such as the Lanza di Mazzarino family in Via Maqueda or the princes of Trabia at the Palazzo Butera. But much of the glamour and magnificence were provided by a few new families. The huge Florio fortune, amassed over the previous two generations and based on shipping, sulphur and Marsala, was squandered at a fantastic rate during these years: Ignazio Florio and his beautiful wife Franca built immense villas and organised an endless series of balls and other entertainments. Another fortune largely consumed during this period belonged to the Whitakers, an English family whose wealth had been founded on Marsala wine. One brother built himself the Villa Malfitano, surrounded by a large garden of tropical plants, where he entertained Edward VII. Another constructed a curious palace in Venetian Gothic beside the Palazzo Lampedusa in which he installed an unruly group of servants. Beatrice Palma complained that they looked in through her windows and shouted obscenities.48
The social and cultural lives of the Belle Epoque society intermingled at theatres, balls and the new Excelsior cinema in the Palazzo Rudinì, where Beatrice Palma was a regular spectator.49 It may seem strange now to read about the pastimes of these people, to learn how much time was spent preparing fancy-dress parties and amateur theatricals, to realise how seriously such frivolous pursuits were taken. Yet in its way it was a brilliant society, above all in scale, and one that could attract the talents of Puccini and Sarah Bernhardt. It was also short-lived, beginning to go downhill after the Messina earthquake in 1908, so that its style remained in the memory of its participants as part of a transient golden age. Towards the end of his life Fulco di Verdura recalled the garden parties of the epoch:
ladies in light colours with boas, veils under enormous straw hats, gentlemen with their boaters under their arms and a few cavalry officers thrown in. Lace parasols against a background of palm trees and cypresses and long tables covered with white cloths spread with pyramids of strawberries and every sort of ice-cream.50
Palermo’s society passed much of its time in carriages, whose wheels were sometimes painted in ‘livery’ to assist recognition of their owners.51 Even ice-cream eating, which had long been one of the Palermitans’ favourite habits,† was done in carriages parked outside a gelateria as it was ‘unthinkable’ to sit at one of the tables on the pavement (it had to be a private carriage, though, since it was considered ‘in the worst possible taste’ to eat ice-cream in a hired cab).53 A certain amount of shopping was also conducted in this way – the shopkeeper bringing out his articles for inspection – but the principal use for carriages was for the evening drive on the Marina or along the new avenues in the west of the city. This again was an historic pastime: a hundred years earlier a social reformer had tried to persuade noblemen to ride over their estates from time to time instead of trundling up and down the seafront each day.54 Special carriage entertainments included the Festa della zagara (festival of orange blossom) and the Corso di Fiori or ‘Battle of the Flowers’, recently introduced from the carnival in Nice. The Corso was a peculiar event, requiring Palermo’s upper classes to dress up and drive out to the Via della Libertà in carriages covered in roses and other flowers. Once they had reached the plane trees lining the avenue, ‘they would parade around, throwing little bouquets at each other’.55 At the Festa della zagara of 1906, Beatrice Palma drove in a landau decorated with white freesias; a photograph of the event shows her in a white dress, with Giuseppe sitting opposite in a straw hat.
Giuseppe probably associated some of the worst parts of his childhood with sailor suits; there are several photographs of him in different nautical costumes of blue and white. When he was about six a fashionable Florentine photographer took a series of pictures of Beatrice and her son together: Giuseppe is in a blue sailor suit with his hair cut, unflatteringly, in fringe and pudding-bowl style. Even more painful for him must have been the annual round of children’s fancy-dress parties. On one occasion his Mazzarino cousins gave a party in which they were dressed up as the children of Charles I painted by Van Dyck; on another there were children’s theatricals at the Hotel Excelsior where Giuseppe at the age of nine had to play Cyrano de Bergerac, hardly an enticing role for a young child.56
In spite of the penury of the Lampedusas, Giulio and Beatrice Palma were able to participate and shine in this society partly because she had some wealth of her own and partly because of the generosity of their friends the Florios. Several books on this era hint that Beatrice was the mistress of Ignazio Florio, and although he was capable of disinterested acts of charity, this may have been the motive for his kindness. The evidence, however, is nebulous, relying on gossip of the time, the insinuations of journalists and a single entry in a diary.‡ Whatever the truth of it, the Palmas saw a lot of their Florio friends, visiting them at Favignana and staying with them in Paris. Lampedusa later recalled several visits to France as a small child and declared that he had learnt to speak French before he could write Italian. One year he caught scarlet fever and passed an entire winter in Paris.58 On a later visit he spent his pocket money buying books from the bouquinistes along the Seine.59
Most of Giuseppe’s childhood travels, however, were in Sicily. One of his earliest memories was of a hired carriage driven at great speed to a small country house near Catania. Another was of a visit to Sciacca, at the age of six or seven, to have lunch with some friends of his parents. Later he remembered nothing of the lunch or the people but, typically, retained a clear image of the quality of the light: ‘… a very blue, almost black, sea glinting furiously beneath the midday sun, in one of those skies of high Sicilian summer which are misty with heat …’60 Then there were regular visits to the country houses of his two families. Some of the Lampedusa properties, disputed since his great-grandfather’s death, were avoided, although Giuseppe did go to the house at Torretta in the hills west of Palermo. More often he stayed at houses belonging to his mother’s family, the Villa Cutò at Bagheria and the beautiful palace at Santa Margherita. Occasional visits were also made to Capo d’Orlando, in the province of Messina, where Beatrice’s sister Teresa Piccolo lived with her children.
After the Palazzo Lampedusa, the most important place of Giuseppe’s childhood was the Santa Margherita palace in the Belice district, about forty miles south-west of Palermo, though much further by rail or track. The property had been inherited by Beatrice’s mother, heiress of the Filangeri di Cutò, a distinguished family of Norman origins which had been in southern Italy for eight centuries. Around the walls of the entrance hall hung a large quantity of pictures of the Filangeri, recording their exploits from 1080 to the time of Giuseppe’s great-grandfather. They were evidently a more active family than the Tomasi di Lampedusa. During the thirteenth century they fought in Cyprus, took part in the Crusades and campaigned for the Hohenstaufen in central Italy.61 Five hundred years later, they were solid upholders of the Bourbon regime. Two Filangeri princes of Cutò, one of whom had been wounded and captured at Bonaparte’s first victory at Lodi, became governors of Sicily. This conservative political tradition was broken by their descendant, Giuseppe’s uncle Alessandro, who became a socialist member of parliament and was known as ‘the red prince’.
Santa Margherita was the place for summer holidays, but Beatrice loved it so much that sometimes she and Giuseppe spent parts of the winter there as well. Years later Lampedusa described the excitement of a small child leaving Palermo for the country in late June. This was a serious expedition, lasting twelve hours and requiring a large number of vehicles. The family rose at half-past three and crossed the city at dawn in three carriages: one for Giuseppe, his parents and his governess (who was usually a German called Anna although at one time he had a French ‘mademoiselle’ called Jeanne); another for his mother’s maid, his father’s valet and the accountant (the cooks and other servants had travelled the day before); and a third for the luggage and hampers for lunch. By five o’clock they had reached the Lolli railway station and crowded into the train for Castelvetrano.
For hours then we crossed the lovely, desperately sad landscape of western Sicily; it must have been I think just exactly the same as Garibaldi’s Thousand had found it on landing – Carini, Cinisi, Zucco, Partinico; then the line went along the sea, the rails seeming laid on the sand itself; the sun, already hot, was broiling us in our iron box. There were no thermoses in those days and no refreshments to be expected at any station. The train next cut inland, among stony hills and fields of mown corn, yellow as the manes of lions.62
It was an astonishingly slow train; Giuseppe later recalled that it took nearly six hours to run the seventy-five miles to its destination. Eventually they reached Castelvetrano, ‘a dreary place, with open drains and pigs walking in the main street’, and piled into two landaus. For an hour the road was level and easy but from Partanna they needed an escort of three carabinieri on horseback. ‘The road became mountainous: around us unrolled the immeasurable scenery of feudal Sicily, desolate, breathless, oppressed by a leaden sun.’ They had lunch in the shade of a ruined peasant’s hut and sent food and wine over to the waiting policemen. At two o’clock, ‘the truly ghastly hour of the Sicilian countryside in summer’, they were back in the carriages, moving at walking pace down to the Belice river and up the slope on the other side. They passed through Montevago with its ‘wide deserted streets, houses weighed down equally by poverty and by the implacable sun, not a living soul, only a few pigs and some cats’ carcasses’. But after that both buildings and countryside improved, and by five o’clock they were at the bridge of Santa Margherita where the municipal band was waiting to play a polka. Then they drove through the streets to the piazza and swung into the gateway of their house. At the bottom of the outside staircase stood ‘a little group of retainers’ headed by the excellent administrator who had prepared crushed ice and lemon drinks in one of the drawing rooms. Giuseppe was taken off and plunged into a tepid bath while his parents stayed to welcome their acquaintances.63
Santa Margherita and most of the Belice district were destroyed by an earthquake in 1968 and its former charm is now difficult to imagine. The house, which to Giuseppe seemed ‘a kind of Vatican’, enclosed and self-sufficient, was on a smaller scale than the massive palace he later described as Donnafugata in The Leopard. Its façade, which with the chapel formed one side of the town’s piazza, was of two storeys and a basement, with nine windows on the first floor. Inside were three small courtyards and behind them stretched the gardens with their alleyways of myrtle hedges. Built in 1680 and restored by Prince Niccolò Filangeri in 1810, it was to Lampedusa ‘a kind of eighteenth-century Pompeii, all miraculously preserved intact’. The restoration had taken place during the Napoleonic wars, shortly before the Bourbon Queen Maria Carolina stayed there, and had evidently been done well. According to his descendant, ‘Prince Niccolò had had the good taste, almost unique for his time, not to ruin the eighteenth-century salons.’ And afterwards ‘it had not been abandoned as were all other houses in Sicily, but constantly looked after, restored and enriched …’ Searching later for the causes of its preservation, Lampedusa ascribed it to three factors: the internal exile imposed by the Bourbons on his great-grandfather for ‘some indecencies committed on the seafront at Palermo’; the attitude of his grandmother Cutò who, ‘having lived in France until the age of twenty, had not inherited the Sicilian aversion for country life’; and to the honesty of her administrator Don Nofrio, ‘the only one who … was not a thief’.64
As the roads were so bad, and the train journey took so long, there were few visitors to Santa Margherita apart from Giuseppe’s aunt, Giulia Trigona, and her daughter Clementina. Fifty years later Lampedusa recalled that his first cousin ‘was then, as she is now, a male in a skirt. Determined, rough and aggressive, she was (exactly for those qualities which later proved negative) a welcome games companion for a boy of six or seven.’ He remembered breakfasts together at a metal table in the garden, a prank in a large cage designed for monkeys, and ‘interminable tricycle races that took place not only in the garden but also in the house between the entrance hall and the Leopoldo salon …’65§
Social life at Santa Margherita revolved around local notables whom Beatrice invited to dine in turn (without their wives partly because ‘women in the country did not pay visits’ before the First World War, and partly because their menfolk did not ‘consider them sufficiently presentable’) and to play cards in the ballroom twice a week. To Giuseppe the guests seemed ‘good people without exception’, and he has left some moving descriptions of these sad old men, forced by impecuniosity to live in Santa Margherita where they passed the time reminiscing on younger days spent in Paris or Palermo. Other evenings were enlivened by groups of strolling players who performed in the palace theatre. They used to arrive in summer, rent the theatre at a nominal price from Beatrice and stage different plays every night for a fortnight. Almost half a century later, Giuseppe recalled how a performance of Hamlet at Santa Margherita had ‘made an audience, ninety per cent of whom were illiterate labourers, shudder with excitement’.66
Each Sunday the family ‘heard High Mass sung without excessive fervour’ in the chapel, but there seem to have been few other duties for Giuseppe at Santa Margherita. For much of the time he could lead the solitary life he so loved in Palermo, exploring with his dog Tom. He could roam in the large informal garden which ‘in the furnace of summer … was a paradise of parched scents’, or he could wander about the house: ‘one would open a door on a passage and glimpse a perspective of rooms dim in the shade of half-pulled shutters, their walls covered with French prints …’ He liked to visit his grandfather’s gun room with its stuffed birds, photographs of gun dogs and racks of shotguns. At the age of ten his father persuaded him to take up shooting and, encouraged by a gamekeeper, he went into the garden and shot two robins. Horrified by the sight of blood on their feathers, he went straight to Don Giulio and told him he would never shoot again.67
Giuseppe learnt to read at Santa Margherita, he recalled later, at the surprisingly late age of eight, after he had learned to speak Italian, French and German. Before then he was read biblical stories three days a week and tales of classical mythology on the other three. But sometimes he was allowed boys’ adventure stories as well and later he recalled his grandmother trying hard not to fall asleep while reading about pirates in the Caribbean. At the age of eight Donna Carmela from Santa Margherita was brought in to teach him how to read and write. Beatrice then taught him to write French, and later he remembered her at a desk writing clearly le chien, le chat, le cheval in the columns of an exercise book. From this he graduated quickly to the library, which contained a varied collection of books including almost every work of the Enlightenment, some fine editions of Cervantes and La Fontaine, and various modern writers such as Zola and Verga. One of Giuseppe’s favourite books was ‘a collection of Napoleonic bulletins and campaign reports which were my delight in the long silence-filled summer afternoons as I read them sprawled on one of those enormous “poufs” which occupied the centre of the ballroom’. It was probably this book which stimulated his great interest in the Napoleonic wars. Fifty years later he could still draw detailed maps of Napoleon’s battlefields from memory.68
One of the features of life at Santa Margherita was organised afternoon walks, though presumably these did not take place in the middle of summer. The walks were usually four miles in length and the participants would walk either two miles in one direction and then back again, or else four miles in another direction with a carriage following behind to transport them home. In the autumn they sometimes went to a vineyard to eat grapes, though when it was raining they went no further than the town’s public gardens, a place of ‘quite infinite melancholy’ planted with ilexes and cypresses. From these, however, there was an impressive view: ‘opposite stretched a vast range of low mountains, all yellow from reaping, with blackish patches of burnt stubble, so that one had a vivid impression of a monstrous crouching beast’. Against this great backdrop a few villages could be distinguished, ‘all weltering in poverty and dog-days, and in an ignorance against which they never reacted with the very faintest of flickers’.69
Twice a year a more serious expedition was organised to La Venaría, a Cutò shooting lodge about four miles from Santa Margherita. The cooks left the palace at seven in the morning to prepare the macaroni, the Lampedusas and their local guests following more leisurely a few hours later. Giuseppe, his mother and his governess were driven in a dog-cart, but it was traditional for the men to go on donkeys even if they owned a horse. At La Venaría two tables were laid outside on the terrace and the guests settled down to a huge meal of pasta, fish, stuffed turkey and iced cake. Wines, however, were not important. Although the men liked their glasses filled to the brim, recalled Giuseppe, they never drank more than one or two of them.70
It is easy to understand why Lampedusa looked back at his childhood as a lost paradise. The years divided between Palermo and Santa Margherita were happy and untroubled and, in the light of what happened later, must have seemed almost cloudless. The only real shadow in his life, he later recalled, was the castor oil he had to take for his stomach aches.
This state of innocence ended in Palermo in December 1908, a few days after Giuseppe’s twelfth birthday. On noticing one morning that the grandfather clock had stopped, he was told by his uncle Ferdinando that there had been an earthquake in the night. News of the Messina tragedy, in which 77,000 people lost their lives, came slowly, and it was several days before Beatrice learned that her sister Lina and her brother-in-law had starved to death under the rubble. Their son Filippo survived and came to Palermo before going to his other cousins at Capo d’Orlando. Giuseppe visited him there ‘on a bleak rainy winter’s day’ and found him drawing battleships and talking about naval guns, behaviour ‘criticised by the family but charitably attributed to “shock”’. At the end of his life Lampedusa could still picture his mother’s grief and remember her ‘sobbing on a big armchair in which no one ever sat in the green drawing room’.71
Two years later, Beatrice had to contend with another family tragedy. One of her younger sisters was Giulia Trigona, a close friend of Queen Elena and a lady-in-waiting at the court. Married before she was twenty to Count Romualdo Trigona di Sant’ Elia, she was described by an uncharitable acquaintance in Palermo as ‘a poor, pretty, refined, witty creature, one of those eminently frivolous and inconsequential things who are bound to bring their men ruin and despair, unless ruled with a firm hand from the start’.72 This sounds unfair because her marriage survived for fifteen years without obvious problems until she received an anonymous letter informing her of Romualdo’s liaison with an actress. Soon afterwards Giulia began an affair with a cavalry officer, Baron Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno, a highly emotional man and an addicted gambler. The relationship soon became known in the ‘hateful city’ of Palermo which, she wrote to her sister, was making her life ‘a hell’.73 She tried to shake the baron off, but he followed her around Europe demanding that she should settle his gambling debts. The Florios and the Lampedusas¶ intervened without success, merely provoking Paternò del Cugno to challenge Don Giulio to a duel. Giuseppe’s father, however, ignored the threats and persuaded his brother Pietro, now a senior official at the foreign ministry, to have the baron transferred from Palermo to Naples.74 In January 1911 Giulia arrived in Rome to resign as lady-in-waiting, but the Queen, perhaps because she was not told all the details, refused to accept her resignation. The following month Giulia agreed both to separate from her husband and to break with her lover, but unfortunately at this point Paternò del Cugno turned up on leave with fresh financial demands. She agreed to meet him at a squalid hotel near the station, and there the baron stabbed her to death before shooting himself through the temple.
There was of course a tremendous scandal and a great deal of publicity. Ignazio Florio, a close friend of the Trigonas, helped organise a press campaign against Paternò del Cugno in which Giulia was represented as a more or less innocent victim. The train carrying her remains to Sicily was greeted by huge crowds at Messina, Bagheria (where she had spent much of her childhood at the Villa Cutò) and Palermo. At Cefalù the train had to stop so that local dignitaries could board it to present their condolences to Giulia’s brother, the parliamentary deputy Alessandro Tasca.75
Beatrice Lampedusa was naturally convulsed by the murder of her sister and tried to spend as much time as possible outside Sicily. A cholera epidemic in Palermo provided a good excuse for the family to move to Tuscany for a few months in the summer of 1911. In the autumn the Lampedusas transferred themselves to Rome and did not return to Sicily until the end of the year, when they abandoned their social life and closed the house to visitors. Unfortunately, the publicity over the Trigona scandal was about to start up all over again. Paternò del Cugno, who had aimed a bullet through his brain, had failed to kill himself, and after his recovery a year later he was put on trial for Giulia’s murder. This event was a terrible ordeal for Beatrice. Not only did she have to appear as a witness at the trial, she had to endure the massive press coverage which included the publication of Giulia’s love letters and insinuations about her own private life. Worse still, through the evidence of other witnesses, she had to listen to a reconstruction of her sister’s last months and to learn of the long campaign of violent threats to which she had been subjected.76 A further tragedy was still to come. Her youngest sister Maria, who was unmarried, was so overcome by these events that she killed herself.
At the end of June 1912 Baron Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno was sentenced to life imprisonment with five years at the beginning in solitary confinement. Thirty years later Mussolini’s government released him on the grounds of good conduct.
* Italicised words in English in the original.
† The Piedmontese king, Victor Amadeus, who briefly ruled Sicily in the early eighteenth century, used to talk about Palermo’s ‘ice-cream parliament’ because eating ice-creams was its members’ most conspicuous activity.52
‡ Tina Whitaker’s diary, 17 March 1906: ‘I noticed that Bice [Beatrice Palma’s nickname] was wearing the bracelet that Ignazio Florio had given her. Poor Franca!’57
§ Clementina and her mother were both omitted from the published version of ‘The Places of My Early Childhood’, prepared by the late Princess of Lampedusa after her husband’s death. The editing of these memoirs was in several respects unfortunate. To begin with, the princess made a number of mistakes, sometimes misreading Lampedusa’s handwriting and occasionally misunderstanding the sense of certain words. She even managed to transcribe wrongly a line from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, producing ‘provincial noise’ instead of ‘Provençal song’ and thereby forcing the English translator to assume that Lampedusa had intended a play on words.
The princess made a number of excisions from a sense of propriety. The ‘indecencies committed’ by Lampedusa’s great-grandfather in Palermo (apparently he was driving his carriage naked) were removed, and a reference to ‘high-priced girls’ in Paris was changed to ‘high-priced elegance’. Giulia Trigona, who was later involved in a scandal (see below, pp. 34–6), and Clementina, on account of her ‘aggressive’ masculinity, were doubtless excluded for these reasons, but other names and events seem to have been taken out quite pointlessly. A blameless individual who played Chopin nocturnes in the evenings was struck out, and the princess’s obsession with the anonymity of dead, unlibelled characters made her even change the names of places they visited, in one case ruining a story by substituting Viterbo for Frascati. A number of amusing anecdotes, such as the story of Don Giulio’s relations with the mayor of Santa Margherita, were removed for no reason, although they contained interesting information on Giuseppe’s childhood. Even innocent descriptions of inanimate objects like a musical box or a locked cupboard received similar treatment.
Most puzzling of all was the princess’s rearrangement of the sequence of passages. None of this makes the memoir easier to follow and sometimes it entirely distorts the author’s meaning. In the published version Giuseppe shot two robins and then held out his ‘oily hand’ to his dog who looked at him in a ‘reproachful way’. Dogs do not usually look reproachful when they see dead birds and Lampedusa’s poodle was no exception. As the manuscript makes clear, the reproaches were directed at Giuseppe not after the shooting incident but when he stroked the dog after crushing the evil-smelling berries of some castor-oil shrubs.
¶ Giulio and Beatrice Palma became Prince and Princess of Lampedusa after his father’s death in 1908.