The Leopard

Throughout The Leopard, Fabrizio is urged to take an active role in the changing world around him. The government of the newly unified Italy tries to recruit him as a Senator, for example, but he declines. His explanation for refusing the post reveals his preoccupation with the uniquely Sicilian character. As an aristocrat, Fabrizio has had plenty of time to reflect on his homeland and its people. While his experiences are gleaned from the privileged perspective of a Prince, he has spent more time than most trying to define what makes Sicilians unique, particularly in comparison to the other Italians from the mainland. Fabrizio has come to see the Sicilian character as a kind of death cult. Death affects everything in Sicily, he claims, and people are uninterested in any idea ideas until these ideas are already dead. To Fabrizio, this is a product of the unique history of Sicily. For millennia, he explains, Sicily has been colonized by other empires. Outsiders have come to Sicily and attempted to impose their culture on the local people, only for a Sicilian archetypal character to endure nonetheless. This immobility, this sense of being trapped and dictated to, has molded the Sicilians. The Sicilian culture is not interested in the outside world. This disinterest in change has led to Sicilian culture becoming stagnant and pessimistic, he feels, with death and decay the only defining feature. The effort of surviving under a string of colonizing powers has limited the development of a Sicilian character beyond this pessimism and decay.

Many of the book’s characters—though notably not Father Pirrone, the Church’s representative—view the Catholic Church as the anchor and guarantor of this cultural stasis. As an ancient and seemingly unchanging institution, the Church operates as a source of meaning and continuity analogous to the ancient, noble families that dominate Sicilian life. Fabrizio makes this connection explicit, keeping Father Pirrone around as a living emblem of his own virtue while largely ignoring the Church’s actual teachings. In the opening chapter, he flouts Christian morality by inviting Father Pirrone to accompany him to a brothel. He mocks the priest the next day when Father Pirrone suggests that he make Confession, arguing that there is no need, since the priest already knows what he did. For Fabrizio, his close relationship with a priest is not a means to salvation or spiritual enlightenment but a signifier of privilege and tradition. The house of Salina must remain close to the Church—and the Church wishes to remain close to the family—because each institution legitimizes the other. This mutually reinforcing relationship stretches back centuries, establishing the historical continuity that gives both the Church and the aristocracy its cultural power.

As both institutions cling to the past, however, they risk stagnation and therefore death. 

After Fabrizio’s death, his daughter Concetta lives on in a rapidly changing world. Unlike Fabrizio, she lives to see the aristocracy become irrelevant, and thus her fixation on the past becomes even more deadly than that of her father. Concetta was long thought of by Fabrizio as the true heir to the Salina nobility. She is the only child who embodied his notion of the Sicilian character. While her spinster sisters are devout believers, Concetta is only interested in the Church as a means of clinging to the last vestiges of prestige. Concetta recognizes the political power of conspicuous Catholicism. The chapels and relics that she and her sisters have gathered distinguish them from other people in Palermo. They stand apart due to their public relationship with the Church; Concetta, in private, is barely more of a believer than her father. This proves ironic when the officials from the Church reveal most of the relics to be fake. The sisters—themselves living relics of a past world—are so invested in these relics that they now seem ridiculous. The Salina family’s devotion to its own privilege is revealed to be just as false as the relics in their chapels. The status of the family could not stand up to scrutiny, so the Catholic Church—once a key source of the Sicilian aristocracy’s legitimacy—becomes the arbiter of its decline. The obsession with death that the Prince once spoke so eloquently about comes full circle, with the downfall of his family and his culture measured out in the devotion to the fake bones and blood that were displayed so proudly in the family chapel.