The Lampedusa Palace in Palermo was bombed and pillaged during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 while Tomasi's mother returned in 1945 to live out the last year of her life in the ruin, Tomasi and his wife, the psychoanalyst Alexandra von Wolff-Stomersee settled in a rundown, though well-architected, villa elsewhere in town, where he lived out the rest of his life. He had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa.

Tomasi was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily. 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. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of 'the 10 best historical novels'. In 1959, it won Italy's highest award for fiction, the Strega Prize.

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. “You may be the only Jesus that your neighbor will ever see.The Leopard ( Italian: Il Gattopardo ) is a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento. “So let’s make up our minds: Today I shall be a saint.” He is the Light of our lives and the source of our being.” “We cannot turn God on and off like a light bulb. “In the Gospel, there’s an answer to everything.”

“Sometimes we ask God for things, and we seem to get the exact opposite. “A Christian has one goal in mind: What does God want me to do?” “I thought today, ‘What would Our Lady do in my place?’ How did she contemplate the Lord in the midst of her activities?” And you must see God in all things, realizing that he transcends them all.” You have to have zest for life but a desire for heaven. “You have to enjoy life without resting in it. “To trust that everything that happens to us is for our good is hope.”

“It is because Jesus suffered and we unite our pain to his that suffering changes and transforms us.”

Angelica quotes