If both Henry James and Thomas Mann were writing relatively close to the period they were depicting, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958) was written nearly a hundred years after the event. It is nevertheless considered a classic account of the Italian Risorgimento, examining it through the Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat in his mid-forties who grapples with the forces unleashed on the island by the collapse of the old Bourbon Regime in 1860. And the film version by Luchino Visconti (1963) is still one of the most powerful pieces of cinema ever created.

The Leopard is an extraordinarily ambivalent and complex work of art, but from the historical and political point of view, it is dominated by two themes. First, there is the tension between continuity and change. The Prince, initially loyal to the King in Naples, is persuaded by his impetuous young nephew, Tancredi, that he should embrace the revolution and in so doing neutralise it. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now,” Tancredi famously warns, “they’ll foist a Republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

At least on the surface, it seems as if the Prince’s bet pays off. The revolutionary zealots of Garibaldi are soon replaced by the polished Piedmontese officers of the new united Italian army. The inhabitants of the Prince’s summer holiday retreat at Donnafugata welcome him back as if nothing had changed. Tancredi marries the daughter of the wealthy upstart mayor Don Calogero and goes into politics.

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Second, The Leopard exposes the failure of Italian Unification. Lampedusa shows it to have been basically a takeover of the south by the north. The Piedmontese envoy sent to persuade the Prince to become a senator in the new united legislature refers to the happy “annexation” before hastily correcting himself to “union” while the Prince himself predicts that it will “simply mean Torinese rather than Neapolitan dialect, that is all”. Unification was also maimed at the start by the mendacity of the liberal nationalists who simply binned contrary votes in the referendum on unification. In the film, the announcement of the cooked result becomes farcical as the off-key band keeps on breaking into Don Calogero’s platitudinous speech.

The enduring relevance of The Leopard to Italy is obvious. Nearly 175 years after unification, the country remains fundamentally divided between north and south, and more so than any other European country. The Mezzogiorno — as the south of the country is often called — still lags far behind the more developed north. A major contemporary political party, the Lega, formerly Lega Nord, has espoused secession in the past. No wonder that The Leopard is a set text in Italian schools.

It is with respect to Europe as a whole, though, that the book resonates most powerfully today. Before we can understand why, we need to come to a better understanding of the author’s beliefs and intentions. The cynical phrase about things changing so that they can stay the same was certainly Tancredi’s belief and the Prince’s hope, but it reflected neither Lampedusa’s own programme, nor what he was trying to convey about the nature of the Risorgimento. It has been widely misinterpreted.

The author despaired not only of the Sicilian aristocracy from which he descended but also of the island as a whole. We know from his excellent biographer David Gilmour that Lampedusa was no reactionary, but an Anglophile Whig. He dearly wished that his ancestors had grasped, for example, the possibilities opened up to them by the British-brokered Sicilian constitution of 1812. He wanted nothing more than for his countrymen to wake from their torpor and join what he called in the novel “the flow of universal history”. Visconti captured this inertia well with the two great scenes which bookend his film: the lengthy opening recitation of the rosary, so rudely interrupted by news of Garibaldi’s landing; and the interminable dance sequences, a kind of aristocratic rosary, at the end, punctuated by gunshots marking the execution of some now redundant revolutionaries.

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It was, in fact, the Prince himself who delivered the most devastating indictment of Sicily’s failure to progress. Surely, the kind if naïve Piedmontese envoy asks, “the Sicilians must want to improve”? The Prince replies that “the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery”. Their “pride”, he continues, is merely “blindness”. What Sicilians want from politics, the Prince says, is “sleep and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them”. That is why, he explains, the island had always been a “colony” and, we intuit, always will be.

Unsurprisingly, The Leopard shocked Lampedusa’s aristocratic relatives when it came out, and outraged wider opinion in Sicily. The book was clearly an indictment of the island and its history. Leonardo Sciascia, then Sicily’s greatest living writer, bitterly attacked it on those grounds. If he later recanted, then only because he had come to agree with Lampedusa.

The author did not believe that things did not change. They plainly did, even in the novel. The Prince’s power, and that of his class, slips away in myriad ways. He himself acknowledges in a famous exchange with his confessor, Father Pirrone, that the nobility has merely secured a stay of execution, not developed a viable strategy for long-term survival. In due course, Mussolini plunged the nation into a catastrophic war, which Lampedusa alludes to only in passing, in an aside about the Pittsburgh-made American bomb which later shatters the palace in which the ball took place. When Lampedusa was writing in the Fifties, the latest conquerors of Sicily had been the Anglo-Americans who landed on the island in 1943, booted out the Nazis, and blasted his childhood home in Palermo to pieces.

Europe today is Italy yesterday (and today). The continent, Henry Kissinger lamented back in 2019 at a policy event, had “checked out” and was making neither a sufficient financial nor an adequate intellectual contribution to the common defence. If it persisted in this stance, Kissinger also warned, the continent would end up as a “strategic appendage of Eurasia”, of the Sino-Russian cartel — in effect a colony.

Kissinger could easily have expanded the indictment. At the time of his remarks, the European Union was attempting to run a common currency without a common state or even a common economic policy, causing a sovereign debt crisis which nearly destroyed the euro. It had created a passportless common travel area without properly securing its external border, resulting in an unprecedented migration crisis. Meanwhile, the continent was rapidly losing its economic edge to the Indo-Pacific. In the field of security, Europe was not only failing to mobilise against Vladimir Putin’s ambitions but actually deepening its dependency on Russian energy through the construction of a second pipeline through the Baltic Sea.

Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Even Putin’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, though it produced the biggest European response to date, did not lead to a sea change. In fact, some European countries like Germany are beginning to retreat from the strong stances they adopted at the outset. Olaf Scholz’s much-heralded Zeitenwende has thus joined the long list of turning-points at which German (and European) history failed to turn. Scholz’s government wanted to change things just enough so they could stay the same. In security terms, most of Europe is still little more than an American colony, completely dependent on US military protection. But as the war in Ukraine reaches its denouement and President-elect Donald Trump threatens to withdraw, or at least re-negotiate, the American defence umbrella, the Continent needs to wake from its deep Sicilian slumber.

If Europeans really want things to remain halfway the same, in other words to maintain their standard of living, security and territorial integrity, they will have to make some very far-reaching changes. As British and American observers, including the present author, have repeatedly pointed out there are basically two options. Europe can form a full political union rallying the entire resources of the Continent on the lines of the United Kingdom or the United States. Alternatively, the Continent can re-configure itself as a looser confederation of sovereign nation-states each of which is truly committed to its own and the collective defence through Nato. So far, Europeans have done neither, not because anyone is stopping them, but because like The Leopard’s Sicilians they prefer the rest of oblivion to the effort of action.

Most likely, neither the election of Donald Trump, nor the dire situation in Ukraine will actually rouse Europe from its torpor. As Russia advances, Europeans will recite interminable rosaries about the need to “step up”, but they will not undertake the necessary fundamental reform. Europe’s vanity is stronger than its sense of strategic squalor. Like Lampedusa’s Sicily, the Continent thinks itself already perfect, and certainly far superior to its Anglo-American lecturers. But the idea that Europeans just have to change a little so that things stay the same is an illusion. While the continent sleeps, things are changing, and will continue to change, just not for the better.

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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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.