San Lorenzo

San Lorenzo. Sicilian village in the Piani dei Colli district, between Monte Pellegrino and Monte Castellaccio, north of Palermo where the Villa Salina, home of Don Fabrizio Corbera, prince of Salina, stands. This fictitious residence is based on the actual Villa Lampedusa home of the author—a property that his great-grandfather Guilio Tomasi acquired in the 1840’s. Tomasi also inspired the character Don Fabrizio.

At his observatory from which he studies the stars, Don Fabrizio skeptically contemplates the dawn of the glorious new days that may bring his comfortable aristocratic order to an end. However, whatever changes come, he knows they will occur within a familiar context: One set of rulers will replace another, and the effect on most people will be minimal. His villa, enclosed within its own walls, is a distant, separate world, but one that is nonetheless part of a common landscape that has been punished by a crude, drugging sun that keeps all things in “servile immobility,” annulling every will. The dichotomy between psychological distance and social imperative is fundamental to the book’s themes of decadence and impending decline.

Donnafugata

Donnafugata. Village in which the Corbera family country is estate located, three days’ journey by coach from the Villa Salina. The estate’s main residence is a “restless baroque” palace with so many rooms that the prince boasts he has not set foot in all of them. This fictitious little town is patterned after the real Santa Margherita di Bèlice, which lies in the northwestern corner of Agrigento province, called in the book by its original name of Girgenti.

An absentee landowner and city dweller by choice, Don Fabrizio likes to stay here three months each year. He has a proud sense of feudal ownership that goes beyond the fact that ownership of this and other agrarian properties, thousands of hectares in all, that are the main source of his family’s wealth. Donnafugata holds for him the prized memories of an “everlasting childhood” and produces a sense of “serene confidence,” which he finds important in the current trying and unpredictable times. However, the safeness of his haven proves deceptive. Don Lorenzo eventually confronts problems that will bring about changes in himself, generated in part by a decline in his own prestige. He realizes that, despite the outward steadfastness of his physical surrounding, the old truths and old social verities are being eroded and that he is no longer able to sweep away difficulties with a wave of his hand.

Convent of the Holy Spirit

Convent of the Holy Spirit. Religious retreat that Prince Fabrizio and his family visit in order to pray at the tomb of Blessed Corbera, a revered ancestor and founder of the establishment. They follow a centuries-old family tradition, but Don Fabrizio particularly enjoys the visit because of the deference he is paid. He and the king of Naples are the only men allowed to enter the convent itself. In fact, everything about the place pleases him, from the humble simplicity of its parlor, to a little wooden wheel used for passing messages, to the macaroons nuns bake for visitors.

*Palermo

*Palermo. Sicily’s capital city is not one of happy memories for Don Fabrizio. There, at great ball at the Palazzo Pontelone in 1862, he senses his extreme isolation from the society that once nurtured him and broods on his own mortality. He is pessimistic about the future, feels out of place, and philosophizes that when he dies, so will the whole world. When his death finally does come nineteen years later, it does not occur among magnificent surroundings. He is at the...