The Leopard
By Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Vintage £6.99

Set during the Risorgimento that led to the unification of Italy, this masterpiece of Sicilian literature is essentially a novel about the old order – personified by the towering Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina – coming to terms with the new. To paraphrase its most famous line, it was a time when “everything had to change in order that things could stay as they were”. And though the action begins in 1860, and the book was published in 1958, there’s a sense that not much in Sicily has changed. Its savage terrain, “just sun and dust” dotted with “crazed-looking villages washed in palest blue”, remains recognisable. Its crumbling palazzi, “monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible, like lovely mute ghosts”, endure. And many of his observations still resonate. Ask for directions “in this secret island, where houses are barred”, and a tourist may still encounter someone who “refuses to admit they even know the way to their own village”. Sicilans, wrote Lampedusa, a Sicilian prince himself, “never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders upsets their illusion of achieved perfection.”

But perhaps the most intriguing detail comes in the references to food. Some are shocking: a decapitated head returned in a basket of figs; the ingestion of a toad (“nastier than he’d expected”); others sensuous, great meals that end with rum jelly and sticky pasticceria. Some are simply mundane: a picnic of roast chicken and “little cakes called muffoletti ”. Or the plate “of ancient biscuits blackened by fly droppings” that Don Fabrizio observes by a portrait of Garibaldi, a presence in the novel, even if he isn’t a character. For in May 1860, when the story begins, he landed his army at Marsala, about 80km from Santa Margherita di Bellice, the village on which Donnafugata, Don Fabrizio’s fictitious summer seat, is based. It was a defining moment in the liberation of both Sicily and Italy from Bourbon rule – and a year before the British food manufacturer Peek Frean launched its brand of “squashed fly” biscuits and called them Garibaldis.