Courtly love

An affair between young Angelica and Don Fabrizio, the last Sicilian prince of the House of Salina? That seems to be what Giuseppe di Lampedusa contemplated, according to a new edition of his magnificent novel set during Italian unification, “The Leopard” (Pantheon: 300 pp., $14.95 paper). The novelist’s adopted son, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, writes in a foreword that Lampedusa was drifting “toward a revelation of the Prince’s passion for Angelica,” the fiancee of his nephew Tancredi. This edition includes an appendix containing the previously unpublished fragment, “The Salina Canzoniere,” in which Fabrizio expresses his desire in verse: “When Cupid finds his way within an old man’s heart,” one of his sonnets declares, “The Love-god gropes amid the sorry mess of thwarted / Hopes. . . . “

Tomasi describes how, even as Lampedusa peddled his manuscript to publishers (unsuccessfully; he died in 1957 with the book’s fate uncertain), he sketched out more material about the eroding temporal powers of the Salina family. These fragments -- about the prince’s cherished dog Bendico, Tancredi’s rise as ineffective politician, poems by Fabrizio and by the family’s confessor, Father Pirrone -- show the author trying out metaphors of Sicilian corruption that would’ve been repetitive had he kept them. The prince’s grotesque roses, for instance, “first stimulated and then enfeebled by the strong if languid pull of Sicilian earth,” are such a powerful natural image of decay that a second, like the prince’s appended poem about a cistern draining and “revealing / All that is filthy slime,” is unnecessary. If you like to think of your favorite authors only as divinely inspired, then such material is not for you. And yet it gives us a greater appreciation of the efforts to transmute soap-operatic plot lines into something far subtler, more nuanced.

And that takes us back to Fabrizio’s passion for Angelica. What begins in Lampedusa’s imagining as a blunt passion becomes just a flutter, a brushing of the surface that any man past his prime probably feels when he looks on a young girl and realizes his youth is gone. Here is how she greets the prince when she visits the Salina palace as a blushing bride-to-be: “[O]n his whiskers she implanted two big kisses which were returned with genuine affection; the Prince paused perhaps just a second longer than necessary to breathe in the scent of gardenia on adolescent cheeks. . . . “

-- Nick Owchar

nick.owchar@latimes.com