Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore was the publisher of the first edition of The Leopard, issued in 1958 in its “Contemporanei” series. The edition brought Lampedusa’s novel into print after a difficult submission history, but its editorial construction later became central to debate over which version most faithfully represented the author’s final text.

Publication and editorial involvement

The route to publication ran through Elena Croce, who forwarded the manuscript to Giorgio Bassani, then an editor at Feltrinelli. Eighteen months passed between that transfer and publication. In March 1958, Bassani travelled to Palermo seeking access to the source materials: he suspected that the text available to him was incomplete and possibly incorrect. He was given Lampedusa’s 1957 manuscript, an eight-part autograph copy marked as complete, and used it to check the proofs then in type.

The 1958 edition

The first edition was based principally on typescripts, with the 1957 manuscript used to verify and amend readings. Bassani drew on that manuscript for corrections throughout the seven parts already in type, and used it as the sole source for Part V, “Father Pirrone Pays a Visit.” The part had not been included in the material previously passed to him: Lampedusa had expressed second thoughts about the peasant interlude, and his widow had understood that it should be dropped. Its inclusion therefore made the edition more than a straightforward reproduction of the typescript sequence.

The edition also incorporated the summaries from the novel’s analytical index at the beginnings of the individual parts. A copy editor radically revised its punctuation. Although Lampedusa had made hundreds of corrections and insertions while moving from typescript to the 1957 manuscript, Bassani used many of these changes when preparing the printed text. The resulting edition was thus grounded in the author’s revisions while also bearing the marks of editorial selection and intervention.

Reception and textual authority

The Feltrinelli edition supplied the text for the early translations, including Archibald Colquhoun’s English version. It remained unchallenged until 1968, by which time the novel had been translated into virtually every language and Luchino Visconti’s film had been released. That year, Carlo Muscetta reported hundreds of differences between the printed text and the manuscript, some conspicuous enough to raise questions about Bassani’s editorial authority. The variants did not substantially alter an understanding of the novel, but they prompted a fresh edition based on the 1957 manuscript. Published in 1969, that edition became the standard Italian text and was identified in Lampedusa’s will as definitive.

Later discoveries

The textual history continued beyond the first manuscript-based edition. In 1995, Il Meridiano Lampedusa included an initial fragment of Part IV that Lampedusa had later cut. A further discovery followed in 1998, when papers belonging to Princess Alessandra Wolff-Stomersee were sorted: among them was “The Salina Canzoniere,” a fragment revealing a planned poetic treatment of Don Fabrizio’s passion for Angelica. These discoveries complicated any simple account of a single finished text. With their publication, the account of The Leopard’s publishing history could be considered complete.