An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – The Leopard

So much of the reading that I've been doing about southern Italy has pointed to The Leopard... so, a bit late in the day, I've finally got around to reading this classic novel by Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Ostensibly about one noble Sicilian family facing the reality of the upheaval surrounding the unification of Italy in 1861, it is actually a universal story of human beings, their relationships, their lives and their deaths.

It is also, above all, about Sicily... and about everything having to change in order for everything to remain the same...

The Leopard has been hailed as one of the greatest novels ever written – and I certainly wouldn't argue with that.

An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 14: Afterword

 

So I made it there and back again. Not at the time that I planned or quite in the way that I planned it... but I made it.

In the end, the gods and the winds and, above all, some wonderful people along the way ensured that the odyssey happened... all the way from London to the Aegean, over the Peloponnese to southern Italy and Sicily, along the Odyssean Coast, to the realm of Circe and finally to Ithaca.

For this to have been possible in a window of time between one wave of the plague and the next makes me one of the most fortunate of travellers.

It was six weeks of hard journeying (after six months of hard planning and re-planning) but with many moments and many places that were truly blissful.

My rather shorter account of the odyssey was published in the December 2020 issue of The Oldie magazine; and I must thank editor Harry Mount (another Odyssean traveller) for having the faith that I would complete the mission... against whatever the odds.

Since I got back, I think I've felt a bit like Frodo after he returned to Hobbiton... I did what I set out to do but it was an experience that took a lot as well as gave a lot.

Now, like Frodo, do I wait for that last journey to the Grey Havens? Or, more like Bilbo, will I be troubled by that unquenchable desire for one more adventure?