Ragusa (gro) Luchino Visconti made it world famous, the castle of Donnafugata. In the masterful film adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasis di Lampedusa only novel, “The Leopard,” Visconti has young Claudia Cardinale (as Angelica) and Alain Delon (as Tancredi) wandering around the castle. Tancredi thereby confesses that he does not even know how many rooms the castle of his uncle, the Prince of Salina (portrayed by Burt Lancaster), has. “The Leopard” is considered a key novel for understanding the Sicilian essence. Perhaps the most famous quote from it, “If we want everything to remain as it is, we must allow everything to change.”
Owned by the city of Ragusa.
The famous castle stands on the foundations of a structure built in the 14th century by the once powerful Sicilian noble family of Chiaramonte. Corrado Arezzo di Donnafugata (hence the current name) had the current palace built with neo-Gothic elements in the second half of the 19th century. At the end of the 20th century it was thoroughly renovated. Today it belongs to the property of the city of Ragusa as a kind of cultural center. This week, attention is drawn to the cultural achievement with several events. The focus will be on the magnificent library of the palace, which is very well equipped. Incidentally, the palace is an eloquent example of Sicily and its ever-present irritations.
“Woman on the run” or “Source of health”?.
A mystery is already the name. Donnafugata means “woman on the run”. A strange name for a castle, even if it is handed down that a granddaughter of the then lord of the castle ran away with a lover in the night and fog around 1900. On the other hand, the castle is said to have been called “Donnafugata” before. The name, we are told, is derived from the Arabic “ain as jafait”, which in Italian means something like “Fonte della salute” (“source of health”). Which is quite fitting, because the surroundings of the castle in contrast to the wider environment is rich in springs. From “Fonte della salute” had become in Sicilian “Ronnafuata” and from it finally “Donnafugata”.
122 rooms, but a different castle.
Unlike Tancredi, we now know that the Donnafugata Castle, regardless of how it got its name, has 122 rooms in a living area of about 2500 square meters of living space. But Visconti, who had learned filmmaking usually from old master Jean Renoir in Paris, did not shoot in Donnafugata at all, but used Palazzo Filangen-Cutò (small picture) in Santa Margarita di Belice (near Marsala) as a backdrop for his 1962 shoot at the alleged ancestral home of the Princes of Salina. (Whereby Salina, one of the seven Lipari islands above the northern coast of Sicily, with its name must stand in for the novelistic alienation of Lampedusa, the island in the African sea far to the south of Sicily).
Tomasi di Lampedusa has never been to Lampedusa.
It is also typical that Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa never saw the island of Lampedusa, which was given to him and his family as a fiefdom. The novel was accepted by a publisher only in 1958, a year after the death of the literary scholar and writer, after futile efforts of the author. But then “The Leopard” quickly became a sustained worldwide success. “The Leopard” Visconti received the “Golden Palm” in Cannes 1963 as the best film of the festival.
It is also another feline predator.
May there be as much turmoil and confusion surrounding Tomasi di Lampedusa’s key novel about Sicily: The fact remains that wines from Donnafugata are now also world famous. They are produced in a former farm building of the estate. It is one of the best wineriesen Sicily. The wines from Donnafugata have won several international awards. But even this does not change the fact that Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa never wrote a novel called “The Leopard”. His novel is called “Il Gattopardo.” In German, that’s “Der Gebhard.” That is indeed also a cat of prey. But “Leopard” sounds somehow more Sicilian to German ears, and in any case more gripping, the strategists of the German literary establishment must have thought.