It's 1860, the year before the end of “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” In 1814, the Congress of Vienna had put together the Kingdom of Naples (the southern half of Italy's “boot”) and the Kingdom of Sicily under the rule of a Bourbon, in Naples. This is the backdrop for a spellbinding story. “For everything to stay the same, everything has to change,” says Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s 1963 novel, The Leopard. The Salina family is an upper-class family of landowners, with some minor titles. Setting the tone of the patriarch’s life, di Lampedusa says, “Between the pride and...
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