Tomasi di Lampedusa’s house in Sicily turned into a museum

The house in Palermo, in which Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), author of the best-selling book “The Tiger”, spent the last years of his life, became a museum.

Among other things, you can see the manuscript of the novel and the writer’s large library. The daily La Stampa (Monday edition) wrote that the author’s heirs still live in part of the building.

According to the author’s adopted son, Gioachino Lanza Tomasi, turning the house into a museum is a “worthy tribute” to a great writer who left his masterpiece to the world. The Leopard appeared in 1958, achieved widespread popularity in Italy in a short time, won the prestigious Strega Literary Prize and then achieved international success in many languages.

Director Luchino Visconti made the work even more famous in 1963 when it was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale.

Written in a few months

In 1954, within a few months, Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote his only novel, mostly in a café in Palermo, the story of the decline of a Sicilian noble family at the time of Italian unification under Garibaldi and the following era.

The work has been compared to Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks”, both novels talking about the social decline of a respectable family. The high level of linguistic proficiency that characterizes both books is comparable.