The Salina Canzoniere

The Salina Canzoniere is an incomplete collection of poems attributed to Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, whose surviving pages expose a private and unexpectedly vulnerable side of the prince. The afterword presents it both as a material discovery among the ruins left by Allied air raids and as a fragment of a planned novel chapter. Its contents include Father Pirrone’s formal ode, Don Fabrizio’s difficult sonnets, and a few verses marked as the work of Tancredi Falconeri; the absent conclusion was meant to reveal the prince’s love for Angelica Sedàra.

Identity and Intended Place

The title The Salina Canzoniere belongs to a file and to the incomplete poetic project represented by its contents. An afterword describes the title on the file as ironic, or perhaps intended ironically, and explains that a previously unpublished fragment of the novel bore the same name. The surviving fragment does not make Don Fabrizio’s love for Angelica apparent. The intended ending, however, was to disclose that love through the final sonnets, which were to be dedicated to her. The collection therefore survives in a deliberately incomplete form: its most consequential emotional revelation is described but not present in the poems reproduced from the file.

In a 1968 interview with La Fiera Letteraria, the afterword’s speaker had already alluded to other material written for The Leopard, including poems attributed to Don Fabrizio that revealed his love for Angelica. The account of the recovered fragment refines that earlier statement. The evidence distinguishes what the extant text actually shows from what the larger project was intended to disclose, making absence part of the collection’s identity rather than a gap to be silently filled.

The File and Its Contents

The file was found amid ruins, covered with powdery debris left by buildings destroyed in the Allied air raids. It was made of coarse blue paper and contained a thin printed sheaf from Palermo, issued in 1863 by E. Pedone Lauriel. The title page identifies the printed work as an ode celebrating the illustrious Salina-Corbèra house and Don Fabrizio’s fiftieth birthday, composed and dedicated by Father Saverio Pirrone. The celebration’s official, public form contrasts with the collection’s other contents: pages in varied formats and on different kinds of paper, covered in Don Fabrizio’s elegant handwriting.

Those handwritten pages contain twenty-seven sonnets, along with a few more pages in the prince’s hand annotated as the work of Tancredi. The materials thus bring together different kinds of authorship under one title: Father Pirrone’s printed ceremonial poem, Don Fabrizio’s substantial but technically troubled sequence, and Tancredi’s smaller contribution. Their different physical forms remain visible in the afterword’s account. The printed ode is a fair copy, while the sonnets appear on two added pages, each containing first and second drafts with variants.

Composition and Editorial History

The poems belong to a blue exercise book that also contains Father Pirrone Pays a Visit and A Society Evening. The latter is identified as Part VI, which the 1957 version was to call A Ball. A Society Evening and The Salina Canzoniere were numbered in sequence, and their sheets formed part of the exercise book’s original binding, although they had been removed. In the 1957 draft, the first two texts were inserted and the third was dropped. The account presents this sequence as evidence of a precise authorial intention, while also observing that the chapter ultimately remains incomplete.

The arrangement preserves a distinction between kinds of revision. The sonnets survive in multiple drafts, with variants, suggesting active composition across the added pages. Father Pirrone’s ode, by contrast, appears as a fair copy and follows the author’s handwritten page numbering. The afterword links the ode to a real Canzonetta written by the historical Father Pirrone for the wedding of Lampedusa’s grandfather. That earlier poem provides a clue to the ode’s burlesque approach: Father Pirrone’s literary performance is an erudite parody grounded in a specific family occasion.

Poetry, Character, and Incompleteness

The afterword prints Father Pirrone’s ode in full not for its poetic merit, but because it illustrates the social atmosphere in which the Jesuit displayed his modest yet affecting eloquence. The collection is thus presented as evidence of a household’s poetic activity as well as a set of individual literary efforts. Its poems belong to a world in which writing verse was not confined to professional authors or a small circle of initiates: people of limited culture could give emotion a measured form without seeking publication, while still cherishing the possibility of literary survival.

Don Fabrizio’s sonnets receive a more cautious editorial treatment. Their prosody and metre are so tangled that the editor says the difficulties of deciphering them are often insurmountable. Syntax, padding, and syllables in excess or deficiency make many of the poems incomprehensible to modern readers. Rather than expose a figure deserving respect to public ridicule for failures of expression, the editor imposes severe censorship and offers only the less defective poems. These selected sonnets are said to disclose an unexpected aspect of Don Fabrizio and to make him more endearing, even though the complete sequence—and the intended final dedication to Angelica—cannot be recovered here.

Tancredi’s verses require no such selection because there are so few of them. The afterword describes their content as lighter and presents them as a fitting illustration of the outwardly seductive complexion of the hero of our redemption. Set beside Don Fabrizio’s strained poetic craftsmanship and the missing love-revealing conclusion, Tancredi’s small contribution gives the collection another register: it preserves not only the prince’s private literary effort but also a glimpse of the young man’s polished public allure. The surviving pages consequently make incompletion meaningful: they offer drafts, editorially selected poems, a finished parody, and an announced revelation that the missing sonnets were meant to supply.