It is true that at British airports signs, in English and Ukrainian, offer information. But Britain barely figures on the refugee trail. We send weapons to Ukraine, and donors give money, but as yet, for shameful political reasons, the British people have been mostly unable to help the people of Ukraine. Germany, a state shaped by Angela Merkel, one of the few leaders of her generation who was both capable and decent, has helped hundreds of thousands. And there they were, women and children and old men and pets, in an old dim waiting room in Munich, where a Catholic charity was giving out food and coffee and tea.

Cristina comes from paradise: Odessa was paradise, she said. Truly, paradise. She worked in cosmetics and says her life was “perfect” before the war. “When the bombs started I called my friend and I said, ‘Am I crazy? I know I don’t follow the news but have we got Nazis? Where are the Nazis?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s the Russians, it’s Russian propaganda.’”

Cristina speaks six languages. A few weeks ago, when she first arrived in Munich — via Romania, Hungary and Austria — she translated between other refugees and the German authorities for 48 hours non-stop. She helped about 800 people, awed German officials told her afterwards. With her pencilled-on eyebrows, piercings and air of mighty charisma, Cristina struck me as a kind of punk angel. She is most proud of engineering a family’s escape from Mariupol as it was encircled and devastated by the Russian army.

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She is a fair distance from paradise now, sitting in the spring sun on the steps outside the old waiting room, but at least she is safe. “The Germans are strict but they are really good,” Cristian says, chain smoking. “If you can complete six stages, all the forms, you can get a house or a room or somewhere to live.”

Having settled her own family, found herself a room and completed a self-assigned mission to get a Ukrainian child with cancer in his chest, whom she met in Romania, to a specialist German hospital, Cristina returned to the station to help more refugees. The only time she came close to crying was when she described the welcome refugees receive in Romania:

“They just gave us everything. For the children they had made this room, this massive room, full of every sweet and cake and chocolate you can imagine. It was like a dream or something! And they got all the children together and they gathered them outside the doors and they just opened them and said there you are — it’s all for you. Romanians are incredible.”

The Austrian ticket inspector who combed refugee trains stuffed with fleeing women and children — all of whom had been issued special tickets by the authorities — extorting €160 per person in cash, on pain of ejection at the next station, is incredible in another way.

The worldwide refugee population was around 82 million, according to the UNHCR, before this war drove another 10 million from their homes. The average time it takes a refugee displaced by war to return to their country of origin varies by conflict and era — in cases of protracted catastrophe, it can be 21 years. Many will never return. A young woman I interviewed in Munich, a sales manager with a cat and a dog, who had left with six members of her family, said she would never go back to Ukraine. Her husband was fighting the Russians. She hopes he will live to join her in Germany.

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And then there are the children. It is not the babies, toddlers or the little ones you worry about. Their needs are basic and immediate and they travel well, on the whole. It is the plight of the slightly older children, eight or nine and upwards, which gets you.

There was a girl at passport control in Ukraine who was about ten years old. She was wearing a smart jacket and ear warmers. She was in charge of an adult’s suitcase, the wheeled kind you pack for a week away, and also a carrier bag. With her, waiting in the line for people emigrating on foot, were her mother and grandmother.

In a booth, two young female soldiers were handling two lines at once — people coming out of Ukraine, and people going back in. Most of the soldiers at that border near Siret were women, and they looked shattered. There was an uncertain atmosphere all around the border. The sky looked grey and bitter and all I could see of Ukraine was a low ridge, tall trees and rooks.

That girl was being so good. She must have been good for weeks, I thought, ever since the war began. It’s not right, is it, for a ten-year-old to feel she has to behave so well for weeks and months?

In a sports hall a few miles from the border, back in Romania, I interviewed a group of children who are all national and international standard swimmers. They and every refugee I spoke to began their stories in the same way.

“At five in the morning the bombs started.”

Until that point, no one I interviewed had believed the Russians were really going to attack.

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Most of the swimmers came from Kyiv and the surrounding region. Their coach had called all their families, a few weeks into the war, and offered to take the children to Romania, where they would be safe, and where they could swim.

They had been assembled in the sports hall to receive backpacks put together by volunteers from the Packed with Hope Campaign. The backpacks contained books in Ukrainian and English, head torches, water bottles and other useful things. There was an extraordinary stillness about the children. In the huge hall they chose to sit grouped tightly together. They regarded Gracie, and her Romanian co-organiser Gabriela Popescu, in a searching, almost unblinking way. They did not fidget or whisper, as any group of British 12 to 16-year-olds would.

When we spoke, they looked at me with a sort of steadiness: it was as though you were another thing in a long line of other things that had paraded through their vision during the course of the weird and terrifying and lonely dream it seemed their lives had become. They all held that measured, assessing, held-together look you see in paramedics and nurses and A & E doctors, the look of someone who has to be strong and calm and philosophical on some level. I had never seen that look in a child’s gaze before. I can see all their faces so clearly now.

The best English speakers were asked to talk to me — I was recording a Radio 4 programme about the road between Britain and Ukraine, the road to the war. I asked them normal things: what are you most interested in studying? What do you plan to do beyond school? They were all pale. One was interested in history, and one in mathematics, and they all said they wanted to continue their studies.

One, one of the oldest, Igor, said that in two years, when he turns 18, he will go back to Ukraine “to fight the fucking Russian pigs and help throw them out of the country”.

I was so glad he said it, and that he got to say it into a BBC microphone, though I doubt we shall be able to broadcast it. The children’s eyes seemed to change as he said it and they nodded and seemed to rouse and draw even closer together. That is something else they have learned, I realise now. They have learned hatred, and because they are still so young and still innocent, they may not even know it yet.

Igor was tremendously articulate, his English was excellent, and as we bade friendly farewells I punched him on the arm and said, “You should be a bloody politician mate!”

He laughed. It was the only time I saw any of them laugh.

You will find this notebook displayed in a glass case in the museum dedicated to Lampedusa in Santa Margherita di Belice, Sicily. The front of that building, a palazzo on the main square, is a ghost: all that remained after the earthquake of January 14th, 1968. The quake is thought to have killed more than 400 people. It made rubble and dust of four towns. Photographs displayed in the rebuilt church beside the palace look like the end of the world. Lampedusa refers to the catastrophe obliquely in the last line of the book: writing of his characters and their world he concludes: “Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.” Such dry lyricism, bony as death, is typical of the writer, The Leopard and Sicily. The dead are hugely present in life and the living here.

In the wake of the great quake of Covid-19, we in Britain and across the West might feel more Sicilian: less insulated than we were, as a people, from life’s final reality. I know I do. We are in need of mighty stories to show us what happens: what happens to people, to the heart, to politics and life and place when the world lurches under your feet and you look down and there is History, jaws like a hippo, eyes like an elephant, looking right back at you.

Il Gattopardo is one such story. One summer the leopard — an ageing aristocrat known as the Prince of Salina — leads his family and their retainers from Palermo to another palazzo, their summer house Donna Fugata, in the island’s far South West. In this shimmering land — it gets so hot in August that crickets explode — a premonition of our climate changing. (Sicily hit 48.8°C last week, a European all-time record.) At Donna Fugata, amid the bronze hills and heat-crazed valleys, we meet Angelica, a local girl, who smites the Leopard’s nephew Tancredi with a terminal case of love at first sight. We meet, too, the fate of the whole island, in the form of her father, Don Calogero Sedara: self-made businessman, person of grip and influence, a nascent Mafioso.

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As a child the young Lampedusa had the privilege of the same summer house: there is memoir everywhere in this novel. Like his Prince, Lampedusa had a main home in Palermo. When it was bombed by the United States Air Force during WWII he became very depressed. Alexandra von Wolff-Stomersee, the Baltic German noblewoman and psychoanalyst, suggested he write about his family’s past. And so, Lampedusa filled that handsome simple notebook with a story, set among his forbears in 1860 — the year Garibaldi and his thousand red-capped fighters liberated Sicily from the ghastly Bourbon regime, and everything appeared to change.

“But don’t you understand, Uncle?” Tancredi cries. He has swapped the uniform of the Bourbon forces for a red cap. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

It’s a pithily Sicilian judgement on political forces every bit as pitiless as the terremoto, the earthquake, which stills seems to shake the spectral village of Poggioreale, an abandoned village near Santa Margherita di Belice, in the landscape where this part of the story is set. The walls and some of the roofs, the streets and steps are all still there. The people are not. As we consider — nervously, excitedly or fearfully — the post-pandemic version of reality, do you find yourself more concerned that things might be different, or that they might stay the same?

The lives of the ordinary people on Lampedusa’s island barely improved when Italy replaced the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Brutal feudalism, brutal thugs, brutal landowners, brutal politicians and the brutal sun remained. There was still starvation in the South when the twentieth century came. We have known the merest tremor of premonition at the sight and thought of empty shelves, panic buying, uncertainty, death-rate curves, grief and hoarding. Perhaps we needed that warning alarm, given where our planet and we may be headed.

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In The Leopard, it is not their great estates — all losing money — or their tottering, to-be-bombed palaces that get the family through the times of change and prepare them for their coming years of decline and irrelevance. It is the ties between relatives, between friends; it is the understanding, care and respect which transcends class and cash; it is an obsession with the land, with the place itself, that all of them share.

Lampedusa describes his landscape more beautifully than anyone who has ever written about Sicily. The quality of love in his description is fraternal, exasperated and instinctive. The picture it paints applies exactly to the west of Sicily today:

“aridly undulating to the horizon in hillock after hillock, comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung the waves into a frenzy.”

These qualities have not changed. When I visited in a gap between lockdowns late last summer, I found Sicily fundamentally the same place I have known since living there in 2005: beautiful, stark, utterly undeluded, still suffering the depredations of the Mafia and their pocket politicians. But also home to magnificent people, to citizens and leaders of vision, humanity and drive. The Sicilians have been honouring all Europeans, by the ways they have been hosting, helping and treating the desperate passengers crossing the sea in small boats from Africa. Here there is ever much more to love there than there is to hate, and The Leopard makes this point, in inference, with pride. Sicily is perhaps the book’s only hero.

Love is realistically done in the book. The Prince loves his wife but starts the story, when family prayers are finished, informing her in so many words that he will be visiting his favourite prostitute that night. Concetta, his brilliant daughter, is too brainy and insufficiently sexy to win the heart of Tancredi, a beautiful and charismatic narcissist. Tancredi’s chance at a full life with her, one of meaning and impact, he misses, preferring the shockingly attractive and dully self-involved Angelica. None of the characters are destined for romantic contentment.

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Melancholy saved my life

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Lampedusa writes no grand prescriptions. Rather, he suggests, they might have been happier if they had been able to see themselves as clearly as they saw each other. The Covid years have shown us plenty about ourselves and each other — about connection, about the clarity the present moment brings.

Time is a layabout in Sicily, for ill and for good. If you read the book and then watch Luchino Visconti’s adaptation — the match is brilliant and mutually complementary — you will understand its languor, the way Time here is a knowing figure, ever present and yet ever aloof. My current mantra is Today and Tomorrow: if those I love are well and happy today and tomorrow, then we have a great deal to be thankful for. I think I first learned that way of living in Sicily, and from Lampedusa’s Leopard. But it took our times, our changing world, to drive it home.

When he finished his masterpiece — he knew it was good, but he died before it made him famous — Lampedusa allowed himself the smallest flourish. “Fine” — “The End” — he wrote in the middle of that page of his notebook. Something in the script, in the immaculate and emphatic lettering, suggests that that day, anyway, this most pitilessly wise of writers, this phlegmatic genius in his perfect black suit, with his bitter cigarette and his dark daily coffee, was for a moment not unhappy. Perhaps it is a sensation for our times, too; for now, for this summer, for this newish world of ours.

Melancholy then, exactly 400 years ago, was understood as a condition which affected the body, the mind and the soul. The humours were imbalanced, overtaken by an excess of black bile. “There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business,” Burton wrote. Lovers, solitaries, thinkers, artists, scholars, the sad and the fearful were all prey to it.

In her superb new monograph about Burton’s work, A User’s Guide to Melancholy, Mary Ann Lund, a scholar of Renaissance literature, explains how melancholy has always had a span as wide as the mind’s horizon. Feeling doleful, dejected and withdrawn? That would be melancholy. Mad as two snakes? Melancholy again.

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Although we have abandoned melancholy as a medical condition, we have retained something of its broad and pervading air. It has become a thoughtful sort of sadness, one that is not necessarily entirely unpleasant. There is longing, nostalgia and some regret in it. Welsh has an untranslatable word for it, hiraeth, a kind of melancholy produced by feeling alienated from one’s dream of home. We may feel melancholy without knowing quite why; we may even enjoy it, which former ages saw as one of its dangers.

“It is Siren-like and alluring, promising the pleasurable life of solitude, leisure, and contemplation before it traps its victim into an inescapable cycle of loneliness and self-destructive thought patterns,” Lund writes, of the melancholy Burton studied.

She picks out some of Burton’s case studies of melancholy’s extremes. Here is the man who was afraid to urinate lest he drown his town; here the baker who believed himself made of butter and became understandably fearful of standing near his oven; here is Charles VI of France who believed he was made of glass, and the Emperor Charlemagne, who became infatuated with a woman, and on her death with her ring, and after the ring was cast into a lake, with the lake.

It is not for us to diagnose these conditions. As Lund puts it, wisely, “substituting our new words for old detracts from the dignity of those who suffered, talked about and treated mental disorders in the past’.

Rather, what is thrilling about melancholy for us now is that it is a holistic condition. It is a disease which afflicts the soul and spirit as much as the body and mind. As a consequence, Burton suggests, it must therefore be treated in a multi-dimensional way. He is adamant that there is no universal cure: treatment must be tailored to the individual.

My favourite of Burton’s case histories is the story of the Earl of Montford, afflicted with dejection, who was treated by the Paduan physician Giambattista da Monte in 1549. Da Monte told his patient to leave the stressful environment of Court, to abstain from pork, fish and sex, and to spend easeful time at the Earl’s family home on Lake Constance. The Earl asked for and received a compromise on the sex ban, did otherwise as he was told, and healed. One suspects most of us would.

But the lesson here is Da Monte’s diverse, comprehensive and individual approach. For a model which concentrates merely on symptoms, as much contemporary pharmaceutically led medicine does, cannot be as effective as one which also addresses causes.

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In 2018 I had a breakdown — an extreme case of melancholy, in Burton’s terms — complete with mania and delusions. I did not imagine that I was made of glass or butter, thankfully, though such at least might have kept me quiet indoors.

Instead, comparatively workaday fantasies of aliens and security services — and the possibility of world peace, if only I could bring it about — led me to range around madly, to write off my car, to wind up, naked but for my boots, on the roof of an alarmed farmer’s Land Rover, and eventually to hospital.

Writing Heavy Light, the story of my breakdown and healing, worked for me in the same way that Burton’s Anatomy seems to have done for him. You research, arrange and explore what happened to you. By talking through your experiences in an intimate dialogue with the reader — a generous, forgiving, interested figure in my conception, and slightly more time-pressed than Burton’s seems to have been, given Anatomy runs to over 1300 pages in paperback — you find a kind of harmony with them, and with your condition.

Investigating options for my treatment and researching the many ways in which we have conceived of the mind’s distempers was engrossing and often shocking. Recovery rates from breakdown were as good as ours in the early twentieth century, when it was accepted you could have a nervous collapse and then get better.

Psychiatry accepts that things went badly awry in the early 1960s, with the chemical imbalance theory, which held that distress came from a deficiency or excess, not in the humours, but in our brains. Psychotropic chemical solutions were mass-prescribed. The problem, as the sublimely melancholy Blackadder of the trenches said of the alliance system preceding the First World War, was that the theory was bollocks.

Happily, we are moving towards a Burtonian conception of mental distress which gives equal roles to the mind, body and spirit in the restoration of wellbeing. If you are suffering, we now know, you need time off work, a support group of family and friends, exercise, the guidance of a physician who may or may not prescribe medication, an acceptance that we all suffer sometimes, as well as the help and perspective offered by the arts, nature and creativity.

This was Burton’s original prescription, and we now share it. Researching Heavy Light, I found a widespread and growing conviction, shared by psychiatrists and psychologists, that holistic treatment — what the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Dr Adrian James, refers to as “the biopsychosocial approach” — is the most hopeful way through what Burton would have seen as a worldwide crisis of melancholy.

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All of us know someone who suffers. This may partly be due to the pandemic, which forced introspection on to so many, and partly because we talk about it, with a frankness that the internet has surely multiplied. I found that Burton’s conviction that what ails you ails you alone, in a specific and personal way, was vital to my recovery. Taking control of the language was crucial.

“How would you have treated me when I was in the grip of delusions?” I asked Yasmin Ishaq, a leading NHS practitioner in Open Dialogue, a progressive treatment for psychosis and schizophrenia which achieves dramatic results through talk and support, with a minimal role for medication.

“We normalise them,” she told me. “I would have said, ‘This is an absolutely understandable reaction to what has happened to you.’” Open Dialogue understands delusions as a kind of emergency language, a way of making sense of a world the sufferer can no longer bear.

Still, I was haunted by the fear that despite a long and robust recovery, I might not ever quite come back from what had happened to me. But then came a quietly amazing thing. “It’s not about curing, it’s about healing,” Yasmin Ishaq said.

It was so simple and yet it was an epiphany. In Burton’s terms, I was given permission to think about my path as an ongoing rebalancing — of humours, in his conception; of body and mind, of work and life, of rest and relationships, in ours.

Discussing melancholy and acute traumatic crisis with Mary Ann Lund and the psychiatrist Ahmed Hankir on Radio 4 last week, I used the term breakdown. The astonishing Hankir, an award-winning clinician who has performed his stigma-busting show The Wounded Healer to 75,000 people in 13 countries, queried the term. He experienced his crisis, he said, as a breakthrough.

And this is why I rather love the idea of Burton’s melancholy. It accepts a universe of different experiences and reactions, a universe as vast as humans are various. In his Ode on the subject, John Keats saw “veiled melancholy’s sovran shrine” as omnipresent – in his case, even in the “temple of delight”. Burton’s expanse of melancholy, he suggests, if only in tints and splashes, is part of all of us.

Horatio Clare’s Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing is published by Chatto & Windus.