Letters from London and Europe [Hardcover]

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian aristocrat who wrote only one novel, The Leopard: Revised and with new material (Vintage Classics)(a 20th century classic), and even that was published one year after his death (he died in 1957). However, The Leopard has now sold over three million copies, and is a set-text on many literature courses. Clearly the Prince of Lampedusa, Duke of Palma did something right!

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a shy and reticent man who spoke little and people who knew him were surprised at how erudite he became in his writing. He married a Latvian woman who he lived apart from for a large part of their marriage (in large part because of difficulties between his mother and his new wife), but with whom he had a rich and lengthy written correspondence (about 400 letters still survive).

In view of di Lampedusa's history it is difficult to understand how he managed to write The Leopard, the story of what might be called a full-blooded alpha male of expansive appetites. However, he gained a wide experience of life through his army service, his experience of political instability and subsequent travels.

Most of the letters in this book are addressed to the Piccolo cousins, Casimiro and Lucio, and were written between 1925 and 1930, a period of time when Lampedusa travelled extensively in Britain and Europe. In his introduction to the book, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi writes, "they are composed in the same sparkling style as their conversation".

The letters themselves show the same under-stated humour as Lampedusa brought to The Leopard. It quickly becomes evident that Lampedusa loved Britain and all things British, and he seems to be at his best when exploring London on foot and delving into the nooks and crannies of English towns, even appreciating the food. As a wealthy aristocrat, Lampedusa had access to the best hotels and clubs, but coming from Sicily he could not fail to be impressed by the best that London had to offer.

His travels through "Old England" seem to be rather more relaxing. Avoiding the big cities, he travels to Cambridge and Lincoln (where he stays in a family hotel and is served "refined and rare dishes". The countryside is enchanting: "meadows with herds of cattle, lazy brimful rivers, gorgeous hills - a real pastoral scene from Sir Philip Sidney".

We travel with Lampedusa through France and Switzerland and can only envy him for the wealth and leisure that enabled him to do this in such style. We read of Berlin, Stomersee and Marienburg and then of a journey across half of Latvia, leaving Berlin by train at 9.30 and arriving at Riga the following day at 7.00 (no a.m. or p.m is stated unfortunately).

It is fascinating to travel with Lampedusa around 1920s Europe. He takes an almost childlike delight in everything he sees, sharing his experiences enthusiastically with his readers. Travel in that period had obviously become a very pleasant experience of the wealthy, with good quality transport, excellent hotels and superb restaurants. Lampedusa's experiences were by no means typical of the era for the reader knows what life was like for the less-favoured population during that troubled era. We can perhaps forgive Lampedusa his failure to explore less appealing scenes a short way from his path in view of the difficulties of his own life and his towering achievement i bringing Don Fabrizio to life in The Leopard.

The book is illustrated by two sections of photographs, which supplement the text beautifully and a very useful 16 page biographical note at the end of the book provides more information about Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and the publication of The Leopard than I managed to find on the Internet.

I am a great fan of this man and his literary work and these letters show him to be, as one would expect, lucid and arch in his correspondence. However they have only limited interest to the general reader unless you want confirmation of the author's character.

Famous for his 20th century classic, The Leopard: Revised and with new material (Vintage Classics) - and Visconti's wonderfully evocative film of the name, The Leopard [1963] [DVD], with Burt Lancaster - this slim collection of Lampedusa's letters, mostly to his two cousins, is a delicious, quirky and charming epistolary treat. Quirky because his deep learning typically combined with his often scatological, irreverent humour (most notably, there are some very funny letters written in the style of a proprietor of numerous models of high-quality testicles to gentlemen in such need), and the fact that he referred to himself in his letters in the third person, as The Monster (because of his voluminous appetite for reading; the title was given to him by his cousin and poet, Lucio Piccolo, one of the recipients of the letters).

Lampedusa was a deeply cultured man, loving - and being immersed in - literature ancient, medieval and modern, especially Italian, English and French. (He wrote a 1,000-page study of English Literature, published in 1990-1991 by the Italian firm Mondadori; he also wrote an incomplete, densely handwritten 500 pages for an intended follow-up study of French literature.) He also loved going to the cinema - he's insightful, for example, about King Vidor's The Crowd - sadly not available nowadays to us on DVD - loved architecture, and enjoyed bespoke, quality-made clothes.

If this collection was not already a sufficient joy for Lampedusa's sense of humour and impressive sweep of literary references, and his easy display of learning and culture with an always light touch, he's also terrific at capturing the essence of a place he visits (he was a great and regular traveller, typically following a `circuit' that included London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and other vistas) and with great relish he conveys his tremendous Epicurean sensibilities. As one terrific example, let me quote the following, on his love for English food:

`But the Monster, as he has already given you to understand, contains in himself not only an angel, but also a pig - of which he is proud. And as a pig he appreciates and rejoices in fleshly pleasures. At times the Spartan simplicity of the pure English cuisine terrifies him. But more often he is delighted - whether he is drinking, as he is today, thick buttery milk which leaves a trace of cream in the cup, whether he is biting bloody steaks which pass on to him the vigour of noble and select young bulls, whether he is tasting large thick slices of rosy ham, lying on beds of soft real bread and coming from the heraldic loins of the illustrious hogs of Yorkshire, whether again at the end of the meal, sinking a greedy spoon into the supplies of the lordly cheeses of Chester, rosy as onyx, or Stilton, green as aquamarine, or Cheddar, transparent and amber-coloured. Because here cheese is not served in prosaic slices, but whole cheese are brought to the table, and the dilettante (I was about to say the lover) digs into the tasty recesses, rummages in them with a horn spoon and tries them out. And the waiters are often so incautious as to leave the multicoloured treasures in front of the Monster - and their eyes pop out when, instead of three cheeses of about ten kilos each, they find only three fragrant but empty shells.'

Isn't that just wonderful? I get hungry every time I read it and even now am fantasising about chomping on a giant wheel of cheese. And his powers of description extend also to human portraits; in particular one very beautiful, utterly captivating description of a brilliant curator of The Wallace Collection.

But he's not an absolute star; meaning he's not - as with all of us - without some deep faults; far from it. An occasional snobbery does come in matters of certain social classes and individuals, and he can be quite (though rarely horribly) cruel in some of his characterisations; these are forgivable, but what is far from palatable is his unquestioning support of Il Duce and fascism, and his barely concealed abhorrence of Jews (at one point he cites the Russian progroms as an example of `Russian wisdom'). (And if there are readers who say, it's unfair to criticise someone of the 20s and 30s being anti-Semitic, as anti-Semitism was common at the time, I think this is no excuse, for we are all responsible for our individual actions and beliefs, and Lampedusa was far from ignorant in his understanding of many other aspects of life and society in general.)

Still, a fascinating insight into a way of life and living that Lampedusa already knew was on the cards (Sicilian aristocracy, and the aristocratic way of life in general).

As to the quality of the publication itself, there's no complaint, save one absolutely almighty one: It is the infuriatingly stupid way in which each note to a particular reference in the letters has - instead of being numbered - been itemised with an asterisk. As you turn the pages, and the notes inevitably accumulate, you find yourself being advised to - as an example - `See first note to p.43' to return you to the original note in which that particular reference occurred. But then you turn to p.43 and find that it is not note you are referred to, but the first occurrence of that reference, so then you have to go to the turn the pages of that individual letter's notes, on p.53, for an explanation of that note! Bloody, hugely frustrating. I can understand completely why the editor wanted to be economical and avoid repeating the same notes - after all, extra pages bump up the cost of publishing a book, and this collection may perhaps only interest the most devoted of Lampedusa fans (I hope not, they're well worth the read), but then why weren't all the notes itemised with numbers, so that you could be told to, in the same example, `See p.53, note 1' - simple, surely?!

Highly recommended.