A taciturn, solitary, shy, and somewhat misanthropic aristocrat, he opened up only with a few close friends,[2] and spent a great deal of his time reading and meditating.

[9] This was the main residence of his childhood, although he spent summers and some other periods at the Palazzo Filangeri-Cutò, his mother's family home in rural Santa Margherita di Belice.

[11] Beginning in the summer of his eighth year he studied in the two family palaces with a tutor (including the subjects of literature and English), with his mother (who taught him French)[12] and with a grandmother who read him the novels of Emilio Salgari.

"[13] In March 1911 his mother's younger sister, Princess Julia Trigona, a lady in waiting to Queen Elena, was murdered by her lover Baron Vincenzo Paternò del Cugno.

Besides a basic knowledge of Latin and Greek obtained in the liceo,[16] he had mastered Italian, French, and German as a child, and English shortly thereafter.

[28] Although Pietro's own politics were liberal conservative, he was a diplomat rather than a politician and continued to serve into Italy's Fascist era[27] until Mussolini ultimately demanded his resignation.

[28] Tomasi made numerous long visits to London during his uncle's tenure as ambassador, travelling a good deal within the UK and in France on the way there and back.

[36] Tomasi had kept his marriage plans entirely secret from his family[37] and even on his wedding day sent them letters saying only that he had "decided to marry" Licy, not that he had done so;[36] it took about a month for him to come clean.

[45] He was briefly called back to arms in 1940,[46] but, as the owner of a hereditary agricultural estate,[citation needed] was soon sent home to take care of its affairs.

[46] He and his mother took refuge in Capo d'Orlando, first with his Piccolo cousins and then in a place of their own; Licy had fled the Baltic to escape the heavy fighting there, initially settling in Rome.

[47] The people closest to Tomasi all survived the war, but the Lampedusa palace in Palermo did not;[48] it was a near-ruin from Allied bombing.

[50] For about two years beginning in late 1944, Tomasi served as president of the Palermo provincial committee of the Italian Red Cross; he resigned in March 1947, unable to cope with the "dark intrigues" (his words) that interfered with so many projects in Sicily.

[54] In 1953 he began to spend time with a group of young intellectuals, one of whom was future literary critic Francesco Orlando,[55] and another of whom was Tomasi's distant cousin [56] Gioacchino Lanza,[55] with whom he developed such a close relationship that in 1956 he legally adopted him.

[73] Following a requiem in the Basilica del Sacro Cuore di Gesù in Rome, he was buried three days later in the Capuchin cemetery of Palermo.

He maintained a commonplace book (mostly in French, but also with passages in English and Italian; this appears to have been compiled mainly in the 1920s)[78] and a laconic diary[79] in which he often noted where he visited, what films he saw, etc.

;[80] in 1926-1927 he published three articles of literary criticism in Le Opere e i Giorni, a little magazine associated with Gabriele D'Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello.

[58] His novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) follows the family of its title character, the Sicilian nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, through the events of the Risorgimento.

[85] The point-of-view character, Don Fabrizio, explicitly rejects this view, and despite the name "di Lampedusa strategy" there is little reason to think the author himself endorsed it.

[86] The title is rendered in English as The Leopard, but the Italian word gattopardo refers to the African serval, native not far from Lampedusa, in Northern Africa.

Il gattopardo may be[citation needed] a reference to a wildcat that was hunted to extinction in Italy in the mid-19th century – just as Don Fabrizio was dryly contemplating the indolence and decline of the Sicilian aristocracy.

He was a self-declared monarchist who declined the Monarchist National Party's request that he offer his candidacy in 1948 for the Italian Senate and actively chose not to join that party;[88] he was generally critical of both the Bourbon monarchs who had ruled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and their successors, the Savoyard monarchs who ruled the Kingdom of Italy.

[89] His dissent from the typical views one would expect of a monarchist was even more dramatic in some matters not affecting Sicily: he preferred Oliver Cromwell to Charles II[90] and the Jacobins to Louis XVI, of whom he wrote that no one in history had more deserved to have his head cut off.

The Savoyard Piedmontese are presented as naive about the South, full of plans that will never match the reality of the region,[99] while the book's main representative of the old Bourbon regime, Don Fabrizio's brother-in-law Màlvica, is a fool.

The equally leftist Louis Aragon vehemently disagreed, seeing it as a "merciless" criticism of that class;[102] many among the surviving Sicilian nobility certainly saw it as such, and were scandalized that one of their own could write such a thing.

He owned 1,100 books on French history, including keeping up to date on the then-current work of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school.

Eliot,[55][107] it also covered thrillers (which he traced back to the lesser Elizabethan tragedies[24]) and detective novels (he considered Arthur Conan Doyle and G. K. Chesterton to be the best writers of the latter genre)[108] and he was a regular filmgoer: even while writing The Leopard he went to the cinema two or three times a week; one of the films he particularly liked during that period was the Disney-produced 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

[65] As a reader, in maturity Tomasi came to prefer (in Gilmour's words) "the implicit over the explicit,"[78] though he acknowledged that his own novel, The Leopard, fell more into the latter category.

[114] In French literature he saw Montaigne as a figure comparable to Shakespeare for his ideas, even if expressed very differently: perceptive, compassionate, sceptical, irreligious but understanding of others' religious feelings, persistent in "dismantling the human psyche.

[118] Despite his admiration for Leopardi, he saw Italy in general as anti-literary, wanting from a book either that it be "exciting and thoughtless" or so boring that its purchase constituted a performative sacrifice.

On the occasion of the 14th edition of the Rome Film Festival, the docufilm Die Geburt des Leoparden, directed by Luigi Falorni, was screened.