Chasing Visconti

I adore Il Gattopardo, or The Leopard, by Luchino Visconti. Based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s hit novel of the same name, the 1963 film recounts the final days of the Bourbon aristocracy in 19th-century Sicily and the ensuing rise of the mafia. Burt Lancaster stars as Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, alongside Alain Delon as the dashing Tancredi (the prince’s nephew) and Claudia Cardinale as the crude but ravishing Angelica (the daughter of a corrupt town offical). Both Delon and Cardinale were, at the time, at the very pinnacle of their youth and beauty and Lancaster cuts a figure as magnificent, yet doomed, as old Sicily itself. Like many Visconti films, The Leopard moves at an almost snail-like pace, a meditation of faded grandeur.

(Prior to the Risorgimento that unified Italy in 1861, Puglia formed a part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The realm, an extensive property portfolio that also encompassed Campania, Basilicata and Calabria, belonged to the Spanish Bourbon kings. It’s for this reason the palazzo containing La Dimora di Jason is the Spanish ‘de Maria’ rather than the Italian ‘di Maria’.)

I travelled to Sicily in the summer of 2000, just a few years after watching The Leopard for the first time. We were on a boat, which meant I missed the island’s hot and earthy heart that features so prominently in the film, as Don Fabrizio and his entourage move between one crumbling palace and another. I spent a good two weeks, however, exploring Syracuse, Taormina, Catania and the capital, Palermo, as well as the Aeolian Islands, the warmth and rustic richness forever imbedded in my itinerant DNA. Revisiting Visconti’s masterpiece ever since has been a series of wonderful experiences.

By chance I’m yet to return to Sicily although I’ve recently discovered the bucolic paradise that is Puglia. Salento - the tip of the heel of the Italian boot - reminds me of perhaps an even more rustic version of Sicily where, if you were to combine Lecce with Gallipoli, you might have Syracuse. Despite the difference in season, when I arrived in Lecce for the first time on New Years Day in 2019, I was suddenly transported back to Sicily: Roman ruins, Baroque architecture and olive trees, and being a peninsula, never too far from the sea.

I often wonder if Visconti, a native of Milan who lived most of his life in Rome, ever visited Puglia. He owned a villa on the island of Ischia, near Naples, so must have liked the south. And then there’s the obvious passion that went into The Leopard. Driving along the Adriatic coast south of Otranto or perhaps wandering the streets of Galatina, as the town sleeps in the afternoon, I can’t help but think of Visconti, imagining he might have loved it.

If you’d like to know a little more about this fascinating filmmaker, you can see the story I wrote for Vogue Living (Jul 2017) on www.jasonmowen.com or even better, while away a lazy afternoon watching The Leopard.