‘The novel is best understood as a sweeping, glorious allegory around the whole canvas of mortality and its inevitability; decay, fading, abandonment, loss, sadness, decline, completion, finality. It is set in a 19th-century Sicily beset by civil war and revolution, and we are presented with the story of Don Fabrizo Corbera, Prince of Salina, as he attempts to navigate the disruptive political and social upheaval around him and his family.
‘In Lampedusa’s famous phrase, the Prince sees that everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same; tradition must be broken to protect his family’s influence, and if this is to be achieved then there must be an accommodation towards the new forces of upward financial and political power of the peasantry and the minor gentry.