Prince Fabrizio watches the Risorgimento transform Sicily, knowing his aristocratic world is ending, participating in its end because he sees no alternative. Lampedusa, himself an Italian prince, wrote this as his only novel and died before seeing it published. The prose is rich with sensory detail: the smell of jasmine, the heat of the Sicilian summer, the taste of decay. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change: the line became proverbial. The novel is about time, about class, about the melancholy of loving what must pass. The prince knows everything and can save nothing.