The Leopard: The Original Film for Foodies

The Leopard is being re-released by the BFI this week in a new digital restoration. Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s great Sicilian novel was first seen in 1963 and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Il Gattopardo, to give it its Italian name, charts the decline of the house of Salina, a once mighty clan of Sicilian nobles who watch their power slip away as Garibaldi drags 19th-century Italy toward unity and modernity. But alongside the political narrative, book and film give a starring role to another timeless Italian reality: food.

Lampedusa’s novel offers a detailed account of the island’s cuisine, revealing his own Sicilian roots in the loving attention he lavishes on what his characters eat. Visconti’s film follows suit, sensitively reproducing the detail of the author’s Sicilian dinner table, and pushing the ideas he wished to convey through them. In short, long before the food porn of this year’s I Am Love, The Leopard was the first great Italian food movie. But it all comes from the book.

The Salinas (pictured below right), headed by humane, flawed Prince Fabrizio (the Leopard of the title, played in the film by Burt Lancaster) are living out the dog days of a once grand existence. They eat from mismatched china plates, the “mere survivors of many a scullion’s massacre”, but they eat well.

Arriving at their country house, the Prince has his wife invite a few local dignitaries to dinner, among them the rapacious local mayor, Calogero Sedàra. Made wealthy by profiteering and money-lending, Don Calogero is already as rich as the Salinas. He is the coming man, and come he does to dinner, wearing an embarrassing tailcoat and bringing with him his green-eyed daughter Angelica.

This is a very public dinner, then, and each course has been carefully weighed by Lampedusa for its impact. One in particular has become legendary beyond the pages of The Leopard: much to the relief of his guests on such a hot evening, the Prince rejects the starter of soup which the fashion of the day apparently demands in favour of a quintessentially Sicilian dish of maccherone.

Forget what you think you know about that British staple, macaroni cheese, and the nursery comforts of its bland whiteness. Macaroni casa Salina provokes “quivers of admiration” in the assembled diners: “The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delight released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice-laden haze, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.”

Visconti doesn’t neglect this opportunity for culinary theatre, demonstrating a feel for the novel’s dining codes that he uses to powerful effect on several occasions in the film: here he gives us a procession of frock-coated footmen, bringing a series of pies to a candle-lit table for the Prince to cut personally.

Below, Burt Lancaster introduces The Leopard:

Outlandishly rich though the dish may seem to a modern eater – pasta and pastry? – the timballo has long been a favourite in Sicily and the south of Italy. From the French timbale, to denote the rounded dish which gives it its domed shape, it dates back to the French rule of Sicily in the 13th century. The origin of its component parts goes back still further, to the 10th century, when Arab invaders are thought to have brought spices and pasta to Lampedusa’s island. Topped by its dome of golden pastry, timballo represents a kind of pastried history of Sicily invaded, Sicily enslaved. But valuable culinary clue though that is, and crucial though it will prove to be later in the story, it’s not why Lampedusa includes it.

In her book Pomp and Sustenance, the great writer on Sicilian food Mary Taylor-Simeti includes a recipe for Timballo di Maccheroni in Bianco that contains 22 ingredients, including a considerable quantity of lard, chicken giblets and “where available, unlaid eggs”  A southern Italian friend notes that it harks back to a time when women lived in extended family groups and would have time to prepare such complex treats. This, then, is a dish that can only easily be made by many hands and that is why Lampedusa has his Prince serve it.

Don Calogero can buy all the land and grain and property he likes. He can even buy an ill-fitting tailcoat and wear it to dinner with the nobility, but – the Prince apparently implies - he cannot buy the taste, the refinement, the retinue of staff that can create this, the zenith of Sicilian maccherone, being – after all - a man for whom eating is merely a business of “munching and grease stains.”  Just in case we hadn’t clocked the message Visconti’s film has a diner noting, in respectfully hushed tones, that the dish has “many layers... as tradition demands”.

Layers in pasta are all very well, but Sicily’s class system was about to get a whole lot flatter, and the flaky pastry of a timballo could not hold out long against the Risorgimento. You may remember Don Calogero’s daughter. “The lovely Angelica”, Lampedusa tells us, “devoured her food with the appetite of her 17 years and the vigour given by grasping her fork halfway up the handle.” Visconti does not show us Angelica’s imperfect handling of cutlery; instead he makes her laugh indecorously at a bawdy joke. Imperfect though her table manners may be, before the last slippery gobbet of chicken liver has been devoured, Prince Fabrizio’s ambitious, charming, impoverished favourite nephew Tancredi has fallen advisedly in love with beautiful, ravenous Angelica, played by Claudia Cardinale (pictured above left, dancing with Lancaster). No fool, the Leopard sees how things are: Tancredi must reject the Prince’s own shy daughter, Concetta, and marry Angelica for her money.

Marry her he does, but the match is not enough to halt the decline of the house of Salina. The Prince himself withdraws from the new order created by Garibaldi’s revolution. In a scene that survives the transition from novel to film almost entirely intact, we find him turning down the offer of a seat in the Senate. To a naively idealistic government functionary he explains that he would have accepted the title if it had been merely honorific, but since it would mean genuine political engagement, he must decline: “Sleep… that is what Sicillians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts.”

So Sicilians do not want modernity, or even justice. Two and a half thousand years of invasion - represented by that apparently impressive timballo - have left them hungry for only one thing: oblivion. Every aspect of their culture serves this soporific end, from their penchant for violence and vendettas to the very food on their tables. The Prince warns his guest that even the seemingly innocent desserts for which the island is famous, like sorbet, should be approached with caution. After all, they represent “a hankering for voluptuous immobility” that is part of the island’s urge towards oblivion and ultimate death.

In this scene, both Lampedusa and Visconti allow us to see what, blinded by gluttony, has been invisible to us till now. The island’s culinary heritage isn’t a sign of vitality, of defiant grandeur in the face of revolution: it’s a throwback, however delicious, to a history of enslavement and inertia. Sicily, unable to make a break with its history, chooses instead to feast on its own past to the point of stupefaction. Buon appetito.

• The Leopard is showing at the BFI Southbank and other cinemas
• Find The Leopard on Amazon