Substantial new material about Lampedusa’s life has been discovered since I wrote the first edition of this book, some of it unearthed in unlikely places. One moving letter written by the prince as he was dying in 1957 was discovered nearly half a century later concealed in a book called The Adventures of Captain Cook. It had been addressed to his adopted son but by mistake was never sent.
Much of Alessandra di Lampedusa’s correspondence with her husband has emerged in recent years and illuminates some of the problems of their courtship and marriage. But the most spectacular find is a batch of letters Lampedusa wrote to his Piccolo cousins in the late 1920s, until now the decade of his life about which least was known. After being lost for many years, the correspondence was acquired by Senator Marcello Dell’Utri for his Fondazione Biblioteca di via Senato in Milan. Edited by Gioacchino Lanza and Salvatore Silvano Nigro, it was published by Mondadori in November 2006.
None of these discoveries has markedly changed my views on Lampedusa or the circumstances of his life, but all have added depth as well as details to the picture I had formed. I am thus enormously grateful for the opportunity to prepare a new edition of this book. As before, my principal debt is to Gioacchino Lanza, who now runs the San Carlo Opera House in Naples, and his wife Nicoletta: both in Naples and in correspondence they have clarified numerous obscurities in the fresh material. But I have also accumulated a new list of debts: to Marcello Dell’Utri and Stefano Colloca, who encouraged me to work on the Piccolo letters before they were published; to Gillon Aitken, my agent, who rescued the book from its early vicissitudes; to Gail Pirkis, James Daunt and Johnny de Falbe, who pressed for a new edition; and to Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson of Eland Books, who have so gracefully resurrected the work.
Edinburgh, January 2007