The Leopard , published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, Berlin). The letters, here published for the first time, display much of Lampedusa's distinctive style present in his later work; not only the razor sharp introspection, but also a wicked sense of humor, playful in its description of the comedie humaine. United and underpinned by the genre of the novel, Lampedusa's lifetime obsession, some letters also read like excerpts from a Stendhalian travel journal, whilst others are pickwickian adventures populated with comic, exaggerated personalities.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa, was born in Palermo, Sicily in 1896. Other than three articles that appeared in an obscure Italian journal in 1926-27, Lampedusa was unpublished in his own lifetime. He began The Leopard, his only novel, in 1954, at the age of 58. When he died aged 61 in 1957, the completed manuscript for The Leopard had received only rejections from publishers.