Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (toh-MAH-see dee lahm-puh-DEW-suh) was born on December 23, 1876, into an impoverished, aristocratic Sicilian family of ancient if generally undistinguished lineage. Lampedusa’s great-grandfather, an amateur astronomer of some note, was an exception to this pattern. However, his failure to leave a will at the time of his death plunged his descendants into a ruinous cycle of legal claims and counterclaims that scattered what little remained of the family fortune. It is this intriguing figure, Prince Giulio Tomasi, who would serve Lampedusa as the model for Prince Fabrizio Corbera in his novel Il gattopardo (1958; The Leopard, 1960).

Lampedusa was a shy, unathletic child who preferred his own company to that of others. He spent most of his early years in the family palace in the Sicilian city of Palermo and retained vivid sensory memories of it and his family’s properties in the countryside. According to Lampedusa’s biographer David Gilmour, the major influence in his life seems to have been his mother, a talented, attractive woman who figured prominently in Palermo’s smart society.

Lampedusa’s father hoped that his son would become a diplomat. As a result, the young man attended school in Rome, but with Italy’s entry into World War I in 1915, his university career was interrupted. Drafted for military service late that year, Lampedusa served in the artillery and saw active service in 1917 against Austria. He was wounded and captured shortly afterward, but managed to escape.

After the war Lampedusa suffered from a variety of illnesses, some apparently psychosomatic, and abandoned his law studies. He seems to have grown disillusioned with Sicily, and over the next few years he lived for the most part in northern Italy. Although he had given up a university career, he could read a number of languages and had transformed himself into an expert on British and European history and literature.

Lampedusa had met his uncle’s married stepdaughter, the Freudian psychoanalyst Alessandra Wolff, in London in 1925, and later visited her family estate in Latvia. The two came to share an intense interest in intellectual matters, and after Alessandra obtained a divorce, she and Lampedusa married in 1932. Lampedusa’s mother was anxious for the couple to live in the family’s palazzo in Palermo, but the cool welcome that Alessandra received from her husband’s mother and from Sicilian society in general led her to spend much of her time in Latvia with her patients. Lampedusa remained in Palermo, and upon the death of his father in 1934, became prince of Lampedusa.

With the approach of war, Lampedusa was called up briefly for active duty, and Alessandra was forced to leave her estate in Latvia. In 1943, the Palazzo Lampedusa was destroyed in an Allied raid, as was the house that Lampedusa and his mother had rented in a distant village in hopes of avoiding the bombing. After the Allied invasion, he was asked to serve as president of the Sicilian Red Cross, a position that he held for two increasingly frustrating years. Shortly after Lampedusa’s resignation in 1947, his mother died.

Lampedusa was eventually able to buy a smaller palazzo in Palermo, the chief attraction of which seems to have been that it had once belonged to his great-grandfather, and in 1955 he sat down to write a novel. He had contemplated such a project for decades but seems to have been prompted by two immediate circumstances. His cousin Lucio Piccolo had published his first collection of poetry to wide acclaim the preceding year, and Lampedusa himself had begun offering lectures on literature that were attracting an appreciative audience.