Il Gattopardo

The Leopard

Cover of the first edition
Author	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Original title	Il Gattopardo
Country	Italy
Language	Italian
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Casa editrice Feltrinelli
Publication date	1958
Media type	Print (Hardcover, Paperback)
Pages	330 pp
ISBN	(Pantheon edition)
OCLC	312310

The Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo [il ˌɡattoˈpardo]) is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento. Published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli, after two rejections by the leading Italian publishing houses Mondadori and Einaudi, it became the top-selling novel in Italian history and is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels".

The novel was also made into an award-winning 1963 film of the same name, directed by Luchino Visconti and starring Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon.

Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily, and he had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa. After the Lampedusa palace was bombed and pillaged by Allied forces in World War II, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it.

Despite being universally known in English as The Leopard, the original title Il Gattopardo actually refers to a serval, a much smaller animal. Although uncommon north of the Sahara Desert, one of the serval's few North African ranges is quite near Lampedusa.