Via Butera 28: leopard spotting

Ebbene, that's a lion head, I know, but I'll try to get to the point soon enough. Behind this great 19th century door is Palermo's Palazzo Lanza Tomasi: now a complex of private flats, apartments for travellers to rent, handsome courtyards on different floors, the residential piano nobile of the present owners Gioacchino and Nicoletta Lanza Tomasi - the Duke and Duchess of Palma* to give them their titles, which I like to suppose they seldom use - and the rooms in which lived Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Gioacchino's adoptive father and author of one of the greatest 20th century novels.

He moved here five years after the bombing of the Palazzo Lampedusa adjoining the Oratory of Santa Zita in 1943 - a major wartime trauma for the deeply sensitive, introspective writer - and Via Butera remained his home until his death in 1957 at the age of 60.

We happened to book an apartment without even knowing the connection to the author of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo; this is not the place to go in to the Italian word's exact meaning), which I packed to re-read along with David Gilmour's biography of Lampedusa. All we knew was that our base was to be in the old town with a sliver of a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Perhaps that situation, above all the street on which we stayed, was why I fell in love with Palermo more or less on first sight, behaviour which a recent pundit on Sicily declares is only for the mentally unhinged. I didn't buy his book.

The palace backs on to a high walkway on top of the 16th century Spanish bastion

which also takes you past the slightly older (17th century) Palazzo Butera of the wealthy Lanza Branciforte family.

At the foot of the bastion is the Foro Italico. Before the Second World War the promenade met the sea here; a painting in the palace shows a high-society scene. This, believe it or not, was a bandstand for the leisured classes.

All the wartime rubble pushed the sea back a couple of hundred yards; a visitor in the 1950s remembers the writer and his wife leaning over to watch prostitutes leading clients into the debris. Plans may or may not be realised in 2014 to transform the green beyond into something smarter.

Anyway, it was just before we left for Sicily that we learned through a friend of a friend that Gioacchino, husband of the charming Nicoletta with whom I'd already had a friendly e-mail exchange, happened to be the great man's adopted son as well as a distinguished professor of music and former opera house intendant (see the Teatro Massimo entry). For anyone who knows the film rather than the book, the fact that some of his spirited characteristics went in to the character of Tancredi is of assistance in declaring that Gioacchino IS Alain Delon (Visconti's Tancredi). Here he is in 1955 standing with Lampedusa in the ruined castle of Montechiaro.

Shortly before his death Lampedusa became especially fond, among the acolytes who attended his evidently brilliant courses on English and French literature, of Gioacchino and the girl he was soon to marry, his first wife Mirella. So the chronology, about which I was slightly incredulous to begin with, makes sense.

You can see from this 1893 enamelled silver matchbox crest (image kindly provided by Gioacchino) that the arms of Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe's great-grandfather and the partial model for the fictional leopard-prince Don Fabrizio, feature what looks like a lion rather than a leopard. Here's the famous portrait in the palace with vivacious Nicoletta and Gioacchino, having willingly consented, photographed beneath it.

I wrote 'partial' just now because while the physical build, the essential manliness and quick temper of the novel's astronomer-prince seem to be prerogatives of the original - and indeed are so well conveyed by a weirdly dubbed Burt Lancaster in the curate's-egg film - his incurable pessimism and almost Wotanish willing of 'the end'  as represented in so many splendid speeches would seem to be Lampedusa's own.

He was a wilting scion of a never very productive family. Indeed, it was in danger of dying out as early as the 16th century, when the self-scouring 'saint-duke', the first, of Palma who founded a cathedral in this small south Sicilian town and turned his palace in to a Benedictine convent produced a brood of daughters most of whom became nuns. Chief among them was Isabella who took dictation from the devil and was regularly punished by him in a very Fiery Angelish sort of possession. The painting of these early ascetics, mystics and - dare I say it - hysterics hangs in the large drawing room of the Palazzo Lanza Tomasi.

Lampedusa has been maligned as an aristocratic reactionary. Instead, he had a curious ability to see both, or all, sides; he was as Gioacchino put it last week on a visit for, among other things, a 50th anniversary screening of the Visconti film at the Italian Cultural Institute, 'a disenchanted judge of how the world went around'. The Leopard may sympathise with the eclipse of a noble family by the mafioso-like rise of the middle man, but in one of the two chapters (or part) added later, 'Father Pirrone pays a visit', Lampedusa gives a village perspective on the nobles while hardly portraying local affairs in a flattering light.

History fascinated him. He had curious sympathies with the French Revolution and the development of the English consitution, even if he remained ironic about the Italian predicament, encapsulated in the famous (and still, to me, ambiguous) line in The Leopard 'everything must change so that everything can stay the same'. There were two libraries in the Palazzo, one for literature and this one in which Gioacchino sits, just off the great drawing room, devoted entirely to history books up to Churchill's time (the French section is huge).

While Lampedusa's interior life was absorbed by an astonishing range of literature, English always to the forefront, his outward biography verges on the dull. He travelled a great deal around Europe in his youth, and a recently published volume of 1920s letters from 'The Monster' to his friends back in Sicily shows what a lively correspondent he was; in later years he rarely budged from northern Sicily. His Baltic wedding to his uncle Pietro's stepdaughter, the mannish Alessandra 'Licy' Wolff, who later became Italy's first woman psychoanalyst - a factor, surely, in the novel's handling of love and death -  led to a marriage compromised by his status as figlio di mamma. Licy could not bear to share him with the domineering Beatrice di Lampedusa and the couple spent many years living apart.

The tragedy was that, as Gilmour puts it, 'death came to him later than he had once hoped but sooner than he then wanted, destroying him not after he had succumbed to despair, not at the final stage of his disillusion with life, but, tragically, at the most vital and active period of his existence.'  In 1955, only two years before his death, he began work on The Leopard and continued to add to it; he did not live to see its publication. I, for one, wish there were more, but as it stands the novel is a perfect miniature War and Peace, one of the few books to show human nature in the round as sympathetically as Tolstoy. The pessimism is hard going but gives the work its special flavour.

Visconti's film has shortcomings where the novel, as far as I can see, has none. The acting strikes many false notes: Claudia Cardinale is coquettishly courtesan rather than naturally sensuous as Angelica, the magnificent daughter of the 'upstart' new man Don Calogero - how Chekhovian that is - who captures the heart of the prince's attractive nephew Tancredi (the gorgeous Alain Delon) as well as that of painfully ageing Don Fabrizio himself. Her cackling at Tancredi's outspoken table conversation is awful; blame the dubbing, as one must for the princess's hysterics and for the totally inappropriate, tenorish voice given to Lancaster's prince**.

The pace is uncertain and, in the ball scene, crippling, perhaps deliberately so if Visconti wants us to get a sense of how boring and endless these society occasions could be (though Rota could have written a few more waltzes and ecossaises rather than recycling a handful). It was a cop-out to the conventions of epic film to show Tancredi engaged in Risorgimento fighting, a scene which does not exist in the novel and is of more interest in showing left-wing Visconti's sympathies (he stands, of course, at the other end of the political scale from Lampedusa).

Yet it all looks ravishing in the latest brushed-up print; Visconti takes painstaking care to try and recapture Lampedusa's delight in the details of vanished splendour. And at least, in league with the author of the screenplay Suso Ceccho D'Amico, he tries to give us a sense of the various dialogues' richness. The prince's point of view comes across in the conversations with Don Ciccio, the organist and fellow-hunter on the country estate of Donnafugata, and above all with Chevalley, the Piedmontese Secretary to the Prefecture who wants him to take up a place on the Senate. Don Fabrizio's reasons for refusal form the heart of the novel, or at least its attitude to Sicilian life. I can't quote it all here, but I'll try to extract the pith in Archibald Colquhoun's enduring translation. The lines in bold are more or less those uttered in the short clip I found of Lancaster in this scene on YouTube, clearly posted by a Sicilian who had the sense of 'plus ça change'.

'Just listen to me, Chevalley, will you? If it were merely a question of some honorific, of a simple title to put on a visiting card, no more, I should be pleased to accept; I feel that at this decisive moment for the future of the Italian state it is the duty of us all to support it, and to avoid any impression of disunity in the eyes of these foreign States which are watching us with alarm or hope, both of them unjustified, but that do at the moment exist.'

'Well then, Prince, why not accept?'

'Be patient now, Chevalley, I'll explain in a moment; we Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so, we'd never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we're made like that. I said "support", I did not say "participate". In these last six months, since your Garibaldi set foot at Marsala, too many things have been started without our being consulted for you now to ask a member of the old governing class to help develop them and carry them through. I do not wish to discuss now if what was done was good or bad; for my part I believe much of it to have been bad; but I'd like to tell you at once what you'll only understand after spending a year among us.

'In Sicily it doesn't matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of "doing" at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For over 25 centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own...we're worn out and exhausted.'

Chevalley was disturbed now. 'But that is all over, isn't it? Now Sicily is no longer a conquered land, but a free part of a free State.'

'The intention is good, Chevalley, but it comes too late, and I've already said that it is mainly our fault...

'Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts: I must say, between ourselves, that I have strong doubts whether the new kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment: our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languor, our exotic ices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinise the enigmas of Nirvana. From that comes the power among us of certain people, of those who are half awake...

'...Anyway, I've explained myself badly. I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than alien pressure and varied invasions: this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed as should be a country made for rational beings to live in; this country of ours in which the infernal round Randazzo is a few miles from the beauty of Taormina Bay; this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of 104...this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success...

'This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent and yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from all directions, who were at once obeyed, soon detested and always misunderstood; their sole means of expression works of art we found enigmatic and taxes we found only too intelligible, and which they spent elsewhere. All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.'

Maybe things are changing, or my superficial traveller's mind would like to think so. But then I've never lived through the worst Cosa Nostra years or endured the 'cruelty' of the Sicilian summer.  Yet even in Lampedusa's pessimism there's that fascination which, it seems, can never wrest a Sicilian away from his - and her, especially since Letizia Battaglia says much the same in a different context - homeland. If the island obsesses me after two visits totalling three weeks, what can it do to a native?

*I questioned that too, at first: Parma, surely? No, Palma is a town in the south of Sicily, as I explain later on.

**I learn there's an English language version for the American market, where Lancaster speaks in his own voice.

Photos of the palazzo and the Lanza Tomasis are mine; thanks to Gioacchino for the reproduction of the 1950s images and the silver matchbox crest; others are mostly wiki-web drawn (any credits gladly given on request)

Massimo Nabucco

The Royal Opera's inopportune scheduling of its Nabucco first night on Easter Saturday meant that none of us from The Arts Desk could be there to cover it (I've just come back from a weekend in the bosom of Chichester Cathedral, courtesy of dear friends who live in the former chantry there). I somehow doubt they'll yield us a ticket when Domingo rolls up (addendum, 16/4 - they did: the review's now up), though there's always the live screening. Daniele Abbado's setting seems to be the now-usual 20th centry clash of suits with yarmulkes and prayer shawls; I'd love to see a production where Verdi's Nabucco and Co were Israelis and his Hebrews transformed into Palestinians. Given the constitution of opera house boards, not to mention sponsors, I doubt if that will be allowed to happen.

None of this touched the Nabucco we did see, in Palermo's awe-inspiring Teatro Massimo two Fridays ago. The work of director Saverio Marconi, whose main claim to fame would seem to be as the protagonist of the Taviani brothers' dour cinematic masterpiece Padre Padrone, its chief virtue is stillness, though of the tableau barely-vivant nature we last witnessed in London with the aged Bolshoi production of the Rimsky-arranged Boris Godunov.

Production photographs are courtesy of Lannino/Archivio del Teatro Massimo; theatre shots outside and in are mine. Vaguely Biblical costumes by Carla Ricotti steered just clear of the ridiculous; the lighting by Roberto Venturi cradled some effective still-lives. But I'd have to ask, from experience of the ENO and previous Royal Opera productions, whether any update can bring significance to the young Verdi's energetic but mostly callow drama.

We took it as part of a very authentic Teatro Massimo experience, no doubt more so than the Graham Vick Ring there which has just reached its halfway mark. And this was a prima, albeit of a revived production, so Palermitan society was out in its finest (which mostly meant conformist with a few flamboyant out-standers - namely a lady in fur stole and a stubbled tranny in evening dress whom all the worthies seemed to know and accept). At 8pm, with the performance due in half an hour, there were few signs of life as J hit the red carpet on the steps made infamous in the denouement of Coppola's disappointing Part Three of The Godfather.

We found ourselves wandering around the new exhibition of designs for Verdi productions just before it was officially opened; ushered out, we then stood and joined the applause as a dignitary I'm unable to name cut the tricolore tape and we followed the lady of the stole down a corridor of old posters to the central pergola of artistic enterprise.

Two convents and a church were pulled down to make way for the Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele, cynosure of late 19th century Palermo's eyes (we know this startling fact because we were later told so by the charming and cultured husband of our vivacious hostess in Via Butera 28, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, the adopted son of Leopard master Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and an operatic doyen/intendant in his own right. He was to show us the handsome balustrade from one of the destroyed convents in its present position lining the grand staircase to Lampedusa's piano nobile.

Basile, the architect whose original concept, begun in 1874, was only completed in 1897 some years after his death, incorporated classical designs from the key Greek temples scattered around Sicily. The end product became the largest opera house in Italy, and third only in Europe to Paris's Palais Garnier and Vienna's State (formerly Court) Opera. It should have seated 3000, but - I guess because of the Italian space-wasting but beautiful tradition of boxes rising, in this instance, six tiers high -

accommodates a mere 1350. We're lucky to see it now because the closure for restoration, begun in 1974, took almost exactly as long as the construction (and that had an interval of eight years). The extensive spaces around the auditorium seem already peeling and cracked, but once inside, you can only gape at the rosy lighting and the predictably post-rococo ceiling painting.

There were three exceptional aspects to the Nabucco. First, the conductor, Renato Palumbo, whose flexibility and attention to dynamic detail immediately manifested themselves in a handsome Sinfonia. The pleasingly airy sound of the Teatro Massimo Orchestra was epitomised by the bright but not overbearing brass - offstage, of course, in the banda, as well as on. I was curious to take a look at the two flicorni before the beginning of the second half (Italians have trimmed their intervals, thank goodness - we could have had three. As we once did for a Rome Manon Lescaut where the intervals took much longer than the opera and the whole thing finished after 1am). Palumbo took the cabalettas, I felt, a little too fast for the occasional desired largesse of phrasing, but there never seemed to be any problems of co-ordination between singers and pit.

The second unexpected glory was the lyric-dramatic soprano tackling the insane role of tigress Abigaille, Anna Pirozzi.

This, I thought not long after she opened her mouth, is very nearly as good as our current phenomenon in such roles, Liudmila Monastyrska (who, sure enough, turns out to be singing the role at Covent Garden): the same rock-solid technique, the same Brünnhilde-ish flaming top, an ability to lighten up for the runs and trills. Only there, perhaps, is Pirozzi a fraction less agile than Monastyrska. Nor, on this evidence, is she as good an actress (looks-wise, as you can see, she's a bit Gran Scena-ish; you can imagine her chewing the lionskin carpet as Amneris, a role which with her strong chest voice she could easily manage).

But then no-one showed any histrionic talent other than the sinuous Annalisa Stroppa as Fenena, giving that relatively thankless soprano role more than it deserved. There was a perfectly solid, loud Nabucco from George Gagnidze, who at least softened up in repentance.

The Zaccaria, Luiz Ottavio Faria, looked rather gruesome but at least was the real if generic bass article and in Verdi's unusually small tenor role, Gaston Rivero sufficed as a rather nasal kind of Italianate tenor. The chorus, though, rose to the heights and - most crucially - observed the pianissimi Palumbo asked of them. And this, of course, was the third delight: 'Va, pensiero' done not only as written but subsequently bissato, ie subjected to what I am told are the usual cries of bis, and repeated lock, stock and barrel, introduction included.

Was this usual? 'Of course', said Gioacchino later, 'it's the national pride'. This former intendant of Naples' San Carlo, among other notable posts, wasn't much impressed by anything other than the conducting. Not even our Abigaille? 'Well, I saw Suliotis here in the 1970s...'. It should also be added that Gioacchino, as an ardent as well as scholarly Bellinian, thinks opera in Italy was set back several decades after his idol's death, though he finds Verdi more than worthy from the mid-period onwards..

Otherwise, the audience seemed unnaturally subdued, not especially excited by Pirozzi's fireworks; in fact much as we found the Palermitans - though not the proud townsfolk of Castelbuono in the Madonie mountains - to be in general. Anyway, a six-minute montage of this cast proved reluctant to embed itself; to get some idea of the varying talents and the pageant-like staging, take a look here

Earlier in the day we'd bumped serendipitously into that remarkable polymath Sebastian Scotney and his partner Monika. As we lunched and they drank in a rather fine newish Kalsa eatery, we learnt that they were heading for this Nabucco's second night, and second cast. Hopefully this will lure Sebastian out of his jazz lair to give a report on that presumably very different experience by way of comment.