JOST A MON

Recently, Antonio Carluccio, maestro of fine Italian food and occasional presenter of lavish gustatory documentaries, was diagnosed with depression and hurried off to a sanatorium. In view of the bonhomie and affection he displayed throughout his business career and in his lovely TV programmes, it was hard to believe that the same man could be prone to darkness of spirit. I recalled the sumptuous life of Bartolomeo Scappi that Carluccio had presented months ago, and it was with considerable pleasure that I saw that he had once again come up trumps. In BBC4's Carluccio and the Leopard, he wandered through Sicily to seek out the food - both baronial and simple - described in Il Gattopardo, a novel that has been widely acclaimed as defining the Sicilian character.

It has been pointed out elsewhere that the meals are not quite so central to the narrative as Carluccio would have us believe. They form an atmospheric backdrop to the lives and trials of a bunch of effete aristocrats and more or less plebeian politicos who seem to be the vanguard of a new order. But Carluccio is not overly concerned by the lack of detail; indeed, interspersing his documentary on the Leopard are recipes and scenes of street food and excerpts of the film version by Visconti and a biography of Lampedusa, the author of the book. [Below is a paraphrased transcript of the programme.]

"At the top of the hill amidst the tamarisks and the cork trees appeared the real Sicily," begins the documentary, quoting Lampedusa's words, panning over a brilliant yellow countryside leading up to dry and green rock covered hills. "Compared to which the baroque towns and orange groves are mere trifles. Aridly undulating, comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived in a delirious moment of creation. A sea suddenly petrified at an instant when a change of the wind had flung the waves into a frenzy."

Whereas today we think of Sicily as part of Italy, its culture and peoples and cuisine are a product of 25 centuries of invasion. Greeks, Arabs, Normans and the Spanish have all left their mark on this island hanging off the heel of Italy. But Sicily is a kingdom ruled by the sun and the violent landscape, and the book, translated into English as The Leopard, is a love-letter to it, written in 1955 by Giuseppe Tomasi, eleventh and last Prince of Lampedusa, an impoverished nobleman. He died before it was published and so he was not to know that it would become one of the best selling novels ever written in Italian. It is based on the stories of his own family and looks back almost a century to a time of conflict, war and revolution. It is a passionate description of what he loved and what his family had lost.

The aristocratic way of life he knew as a child has certainly disappeared, as well as many of the places that he knew. Some things, though, have remained unchanged: the extraordinary landscape that he evokes with such artistry. The meals were central to the lives of the characters in the novel, and Lampedusa himself obviously loved food, which he describes with the same sensuality as all the other elements of his story.

The book is set in the 1860s at the time of the unification of Italy, and raised fundamental questions about the union that were still unresolved as the country emerged from the Second World War. The novel sparked widespread debate and today is regarded as quintessential to the understanding of Italian history.

Carluccio cleverly outlines the pre-unified dominions of Italy by the judicial use of biscuits. Southern Italy and Sicily, known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, is ruled by the inept and conservative Bourbons of Naples, and he places a Bourbon biscuit over a map of the area. Northern Italy, in contrast, seen to be progressive and modern, is ruled from Turin by the Savoy monarch, Victor Emmanuel (a Savoiardi biscuit is placed in Piedmont). In between were the Papal States ruled from Rome, but His Holiness has never had his own biscuit. The move to unify Italy was led by Garibaldi who had allied himself with Victor Emmanuel - and, as it turns out, the Garibaldi biscuit that Carluccio puts next to the Savoiardi is unknown in his country. These biscuits were created by an English company Peek Freans in 1864 to cash in on the popular fervour with which Garibaldi was greeted on his visit to London that year.

Garibaldi was born in Nice (put a sugary Nice biscuit there), which was part of Italy at the time, and was rather miffed when Victor Emmanuel gifted it to the French. That, however, is another story.

As the novel begins, Garibaldi is on his way to Sicily to engage the Bourbons in war. He is taking a huge gamble against seemingly impossible odds, but the people with the most to lose are Sicily's feudal aristocracy, among whom is Lampedusa's own family.

What traces of Lampedusa remain in Palermo today? There is a Via di Lampedusa on which lie the remains of the Palazzo of the family, their seat in the Sicilian capital. It was destroyed on the morning of 5 April 1943. "I loved our home with utter abandon and still love it now when for the last years it has been no more than a memory," wrote Tomasi in his diary. "A bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania searched her out and destroyed her."

But this was not isolated bad luck. Every property that once belonged to Tomasi's patrimony was wrecked during Lampedusa's lifetime. Family holdings were dispersed and dissipated due to neglect and natural disaster. Throughout his life, Tomasi tried to recover his idyllic image of childhood and readmit himself to that corrosive nostalgia. Towards the end, his book became the repository of memory and the vessel through which he could relive that aristocratic time.

Although there are similarities between Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, in the Leopard and Tomasi's great-grandfather (who lived through the years of Garibaldi), in reality the similarities are more acute between Fabrizio and Tomasi himself, the same sceptical intelligence and the same sense of fatalism towards the future.

The novel starts with the calamitous news of Garibaldi's landing in Sicily, which everyone can see is going to change everything. The novel is punctuated with meals - grand historical events interspersed with family repasts. We first meet Don Fabrizio in the calmest period of his day, the half-hour before dinner. "Dinner at the Villa Salina was served in the shabby grandeur then customary in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The silver was massive and the glass was splendid bearing the initials F.D. - Ferdinandus Debit - in memory of royal munificence."

The novel's descriptions of the food and the colours of the food and its smells and texture are paeans to Sicilian national identity. With white broad beans, Carluccio makes the Sicilian minestra, the introduction to the first meal in the book. He has been allowed to make use of the kitchens at the Villa San Marco, a beautifully maintained palace that Lampedusa himself had taken refuge at after his palazzo was destroyed.

You can't hurry things in Sicilian cooking. The white broad beans have to be soaked overnight. The slow-fire stove takes some time to start up. Carluccio explains that zuppa, soup, can be of various kinds - a bit of a broth, or more consistent, or a puree. In this case, we have a zuppa di fave secche, a puree, a macco. Cover the beans in water and cook for three hours. Chop up onions and slightly fry them, i.e., soffrito. Finocchietto selviatico, a sauce made from the wild fennel found in the local hills, is added to the onions and the lot is heated on the stove. To accompany the macco is something slightly bitter, such as chicory. Pour olive oil into a saucepan, add garlic and a touch of chilli to fry. Mix up the chicory, and add a little water. Put the lid on and boil. When the beans have been reduced to paste, they are made ready with a bit of salt and a splash olive oil, all stirred. Present the macco on a plate with the chicory and garlic accompaniment, and the onions and fennel. Macco con cicoria is a delicious introduction to Sicily and to the Leopard.

The next morning, we encounter Tancredi, a pivotal character in the novel, the nephew of the Prince. He is the only aristocrat in favour of Italian unification, and will soon go off to fight with Garibaldi against the Bourbon. The Prince himself is sceptical that the unification will change much in Sicily, and Tancredi might very well believe him, for it is he who utters the famous line that for things to stay the same, they have to change.

Sadly for the aristocrats, their own indolence was bringing about their downfall even without the intervention of Garibaldi. Don Fabrizio owned thousands of acres but the aristocracy had no interest in the management of their estates. "The world of centuries have been transmuted into ornaments, luxury, pleasure. This world, which had achieved its own object, was now composed only of sensual oils, and like sensual oils, soon evaporated." Seemingly oblivious of his vanishing wealth, or perhaps indifferent to it, the Prince continued to enjoy the simple pleasures of noble living.

At the end of that first meal "appeared a rum jelly. This was the Prince's favourite pudding, and the Princess had been careful to to order it early in the morning in gratitude for favours granted..."

Now, any jelly begins with gelatine softened in water. Meanwhile, dissolve 300g of sugar in a pan, then add the soft gelatine and stir till it dissolves. Add 200 centilitres (although I think it's more like 200 millilitres) of the wonderful amber-coloured rum. We can understand why the Prince liked it - it's quite a boozy jelly. Carluccio pours the mix into a wonderful old copper mould and puts it into the fridge. "It was rather fattening at first sight. Shaped like a tower garrisoned by red and green cherries and pistachio nuts." Carluccio decorates the pudding with orange peel atop it, and a creates a bed of fruit - grapes - and pinoli. It will be complemented wonderfully with Marsala wine.

Lampedusa wrote to a friend that every word in the novel was weighted and every episode had a hidden sense. Indeed, while Don Fabrizio sat eating his pudding and drank his Marsala wine, Garibaldi was at that moment, landing at the port of Marsala.

Marsala is at the very western-most point of Sicily. on a coastal plain of vineyards and salt flats, a landscape essentially unchanged since its most famous visitor arrived on 11 May 1860. The magnificent Porta Garibaldi (erstwhile Porta Real) is a perfect representation of Tancredi's warning - the insignia remains Bourbon, but the name of the gate has been changed. Garibaldi with his thousand men managed to enter the town without any opposition from the Bourbon artillery. Why was that? Matters of economics and British imperial power led to the presence of English warships off the harbour of Marsala. The local vineyards were owned by such English names as Ingham and Woodhouse and Whitaker. Marsala was one of the world's greatest fortified wines, and where you find fortified wines, you usually find the British who invented it. The men-of-war were there to ensure that the supply of Marsala wine, then wildly popular in Britain, was uninterrupted irrespective of who ruled in Sicily. The Bourbon artillery didn't fire for fear of hitting the Royal Navy's Intrepid and Argus, and Garibaldi and his men slipped into the island.

Marsala wine is used in the Zabaglione. Six egg yokes are beaten with five table spoons of sugar into a foamy cream, and virgin Marsala wine, and gently heated - usually in a bain-marie, but a high fire will do as long as we are careful not to scramble the eggs. Pour into a goblet and drink warm. Incidentally, during Prohibition in America, Marsala wine was the only alcoholic beverage allowed to be sold - ostensibly for its medicinal properties.

Garibaldi was only the latest in a long line of invaders of Sicily. The Mayor of Marsala was forced to sign a decree ending Bourbon rule, and Garibaldi and his men moved into the interior.

"All around quivered at the funereal countryside, yellow with stubble, black with burnt patches. The lament of cicadas filled the sky. It was like a death rattle from a parched Sicily at the end of August ,vainly awaiting the rain."

Despite the intrusions of Garibaldi, Don Fabrizio and his family managed to travel across the island to their country retreat Donnafugata. Lampedusa's model for the palace of Donnafugata was the Palazzo Cutò in Santa Margherita di Belice. He spent much of his childhood here, a property belonging to his mother's family. The house was enormous, with over a hundred rooms, giving an impression of an enclosed and self-sufficient entity, a sort of Vatican, as it were. But what we see today is totally different from the childhood memory of Tomasi. In 1968, an earthquake destroyed almost two-thirds of the town, including much of this grand old house. Forty years later, the town has been abandoned, and it is difficult for us to appreciate the beauty that Lampedusa found here. The Palazzo Cutò was rebuilt and is now the Town Hall, but little remains of the original structure. Only the garden gives us an idea of the Lampedusa's childhood. "In the furnace of summer, when the jet of the spring dwindled, it was a paradise of parched scents made to delight the nose rather than the eyes."

In the novel, Donnafugata was the large house that dominated the town, signifying the power and the prestige of the feudal Prince. It appeared unassailable, but in reality it was anything but. The Mayor of the town, Sedara, had amassed considerable wealth from business and political power as well, which rivalled the Prince's own. The Prince is obliged to throw a grand dinner for the notables of the town, at which appears a prime exemplar of Sicilian baronial cooking - a macaroni pie.

Carluccio's assistant has spent a day preparing the stock for the pie, from vegetables and a large joint of beef. But first, he has to make the pastry case. The dough is spread, liberally sprinkled with flour, over an earthen vessel and the excess removed, so that the vessel is coated with the pastry dough on the inside. The original recipe calls for the unborn eggs from the ovary of a chicken, but the yokes of plain eggs will do as well. While the pasta is boiling, finely chopped onions are added to abundant olive oil, to fry along with chicken and chicken livers and truffles (or Porcini mushrooms), two glasses of beef stock, cubes of cooked ham, a smattering of wine, and finally the eggs. Add everything to the pasta, which is very al dente, and the last touch - liberal quantities of Parmesan. Fill up the pastry case with the mix and cover with a dough lid, brushed with oil to give a nice crust. Sprinkle cinnamon and put into the oven for half an hour.

Don Fabrizio is in for several shocks as the evening wears on. In order not to embarrass his expected guests, who he thinks will not have evening wear, he has not donned tails, but the Mayor, that arriviste, appears in evening wear, so obviously trying to ingratiate himself. This is even more jarring to the Prince than Garibaldi's invasion. And then, his daughter, a woman of immaculate loveliness, stuns the entire princely family. "The door opened, and in came Angelica. The Salina family all stood there with breath taken away. Emanating from her own person was the invincible calm of a woman sure of her own beauty." The atmosphere at the dinner is heady with the aroma and flavour of the macaroni pie and Angelica's splendour. Tancredi imagines kissing her with every mouthful of the pie, and quickly falls in love.

For the Sicilian, of course, food is the same as sex, the same animal pleasure. Sicilian food is of the two types - baronale and povera, and it is not uncommon even for the aristocracy to eat the simple cooking, and to go out in the middle of the night to try out some of the food prepared on the streets of Palermo.

Carluccio finds hot cooked food everywhere in Palermo, and the specialty he wants to try out, stighiole, he locates, following his nose, in the Borgo Vecchio, the food district of Palermo, on a grill operated by Don Michele. Stighiole is the tender intestines of a deer that has not eaten grass yet, only milk, and is cooked on an open grill, sprinkled with salt and a dash of lemon, and eaten piping hot. As food of poor people goes, this is thoroughly representative - the poor couldn't afford to waste anything.

Michele, a colourful character of some twenty years' experience of street-cooking in Palermo, is as ready to prepare his own specialties as to sort something out for anyone who brings ingredients up to his grill. His prawns in brandy are particularly superb, which he rustles up to the accompaniment of the traditional songs of his childhood - That's the way I like it, by KC and the Sunshine Band.

As summer dawns and then draws to a close, Don Fabrizio tries to still his troubled mind with hunts in the mountains. There have been new political developments - Sicilians have been asked to vote on whether they want to join the Kingdom of (unified) Italy or not. When the Mayor announces the results, it appears that the vote has been unanimous. But the Prince is certain that there have been votes against unification, which he believes have been conveniently dropped from the Mayor's tally.

The referendum was straightforward: do you want to be part of Italy with Victor Emmanuel as your King? Yes or No. No negotiations or subtleties were allowed, and the government was forced to ensure that the popular vote would be an overwhelming Yes, which they achieved by the usual tactics - bullying and manipulation and corruption.

Also, by October of the year, there have been family developments: Tancredi wants to marry Angelica, and Don Fabrizio is in the unenviable position of asking the odious Sedara for the hand of his daughter. Lampedusa tells us that that day, Fabrizio's aim was particularly pitiless, as he pictures every animal that he targets as that Mayor.

Carluccio, unsuccessful in his hunt, finds a rabbit at a local shop instead. It could have been a pheasant just as well, he says. When he was a child, he was tasked with raising and killing rabbits right up to the age of fifteen or sixteen; as it was wartime, it was unthinkable to consider the animals as pets. His father's favoured portion of the rabbit was the head, exposing the brain and, adding a little salt, baked.

We chop up onions and potatoes and toss them with prodigious quantities of olive oil. Add black olives and Trapani salt. Embed pieces of the meat within the vegetables, and add more oil. Rosemary, a strong herb, is sprinkled and a nice white wine douses the lot. And that's it, it's ready for the oven.

In November, Tancredi and Angelica, now engaged, spend a lot of time together in the grand palace of Donnafugata. Lampedusa dwells on the frustrated anticipation of their wedding. He could very well have been drawing on his own experience. He was married to a Latvian countess late in life, Alessandra Wolff, who was fond of her own family castle in the cold, dark Baltic. When they attempted to setup home in Palermo with Lampedusa's mother, it was a disaster: his wife and his mother quarrelled constantly, and finally Alessandra decided that she would live in Latvia, he could continue in Sicily. Throughout the 1930s, they would meet perhaps twice a year: in the summer in Latvia, and in Palermo for Christmas.

As well as Prince of Lampedusa, Tomasi was also Duke of Palma di Montechiaro, on the south coast of Italy. Because it had no childhood ties, perhaps, he didn't visit it till the 1950s. He found that the Tomasi name still commanded local respect. The cathedral was full of family portraits. But for a fan of the Leopard, the best discovery would be the Convent of the Rosary, which was under the patronage of the Duke. He was the only male allowed to enter the convent, a detail he put straight into his book.

In the 17th century, the Lampedusa family was so suffused with religiosity it was a wonder they procreated at all. The Saint Duke's portrait appears in the Convent, as does that of his sainted sister, along with a stone that was thrown at her by the Devil, whereupon miraculously it was stopped in mid-air by the grace of the Lord. There is even a copy of a letter she began to write, when she found herself putting to paper bad words, which she recognised as being the dictation of the Devil. Naturally, she stopped at once.

On the way out of the Convent, Carluccio picked up the little almond sweetmeats prepared by the nuns, which Lampedusa himself had enjoyed. The inside of the cakes is the mince of a special kind of lemon called cedro. Just wonderful, said Carluccio.

In his diary, Lampedusa described his visit with one word - commosso - moved.

"On these premises, the tomb was venerated with due respect by all, the nuns' watery coffee drunk with tolerance, and the pink-and-greenish almond cakes crunched with satisfaction."

A few miles away is the Castle of Montechiaro, another Lampedusa family ruin, the only one that he directly inherited from his great-grandfather. In the 1950s, when Tomasi first visited, it was considered practically worthless, but when he came again with his wife, they considered a plan to restore a part of it to make it habitable. But nothing came of the idea. Lampedusa later recorded that the trip made him feel orphaned and melancholic.

Before leaving Donnafugata, Don Fabrizio meets an unexpected guest, a nobleman from the north who offers him a seat in the newly formed Italian Senate. Refusing the offer of the puzzled visitor, he tries to explain his troubled relationship with his homeland. "The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect. Their vanity is stronger than their misery... In Sicily it doesn't matter that things are done well or badly. In Sicily, the only sin we cannot forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all."

The story then moves two years to a ball at which Tancredi introduces his wife, Angelica, to the Sicilian nobility. The ball is also intended to show that the aristocracy is as puissant as ever and that nothing has changed in Sicily after Garibaldi's triumphs. But it is amply clear during the course of the ball that there is now a new breed of power, and the feudal lords are dimishing. The ball is as lavish as ever, but Don Fabrizio is disgusted at the meaninglessness and transience of it all, a mood that is captured by his disdain of the food that is on offer. "The monotonous opulence of the buffet... All this calls for stomachs other than mine." The ostensible luxury of the little birds baked to perfection only accentuates his nausea, and written by Lampedusa as something horrible. The baronial cuisine that so delighted Don Fabrizio at Donnafugata now leaves a bad taste in his mouth, and he leaves in search of something sweet.

At a Sicilian patisserie, you can find the history of the country in its food: Arab cassata, French rum-babas, Spanish chocolate. In a punishingly hot climate, the favoured preservative is sugar. In this respect, both Lampedusa and Don Fabrizio are typical Sicilians. They have a sweet tooth. Indeed, ice-cream in a brioche roll may be a strange breakfast elsewhere, but not in Palermo. You have to remember that the poor people of Sicily have to endure a summer that, as Lampedusa said, was as long and glum as a Russian winter.

During the Second World War, Lampedusa lost his house to an American bomb, and his wife lost her castle to the invading Russians. In 1946, after Lampedusa's mother died, Alessandra finally moved in with him to Palermo, and they took up residence in a dilapidated palazzo in the Kalsa, the Arab heart of the old city, that had once belonged to his great-grandfather. It had the all-important Lampedusa pedigree, and starting with an apartment on the second floor, the Tomasis gradually acquired more and more of the old building.

Tomasi's wife was a rather dour Baltic lady with no love lost for Palermo, and the people of Palermo didn't much like her either. The author had his own quotidian schedule which barely overlapped with that of Alessandra. Because of the treatments she was developing as a Freudian psychoanalyst, she often was up all night, going to bed only around dawn, whereas he would be out of the house by 8:30 am, heading for the three big coffee houses that defined the centre of Palermo. Except for Mazzara, the others have disappeared. In the 1950s, Mazzara's coffee-house became his daily haunt, where he spent hours on his books and notepads, accompanied by his beloved collected works of Shakespeare which served to calm him down were he to see something disagreeable.

Often his breakfasts were interrupted by his young cousin, Lanza, and friends. He was in a bad way at the time, both emotionally and financially. Through these young people, he gradually regained his attachment to life. He taught them English, starting with tts grammar and then going on to reading books together, analysing them, creating, so to speak, an amusing course of the language. Whatever amused him or caught his attention, he would then teach and share with his young students.

After breakfast, stuffing his hold-all with pastries for the journey, he would cross the street to Flaccovio's bookshop where he spent the rest of the morning browsing. Purchasing books was the only luxury he allowed himself, and he was nervous about admitting this weakness to his wife, claiming only that he got them at a sale, or cheaply because they had been damaged.

Occasionally, he'd break his journey home at the Pizzeria Bellini for lunch with some friends, knowing that Alessandra would be asleep into the afternoon. More often than not, his bag of buns would have to last him till dinner time. But his wife was an awful cook, insisting on preparing Baltic dishes - badly - once even making a disgusting olive-oil paste that she claimed tasted just like caviar.

His other great consolation was visiting his mother's family. His cousin, Lucio Piccolo, had published a book of poetry, even winning a minor literary prize in 1954. The two of them travelled to the festival at San Pellegrino to collect the award. The journey sparked the creative juices in Lampedusa, He later wrote to a friend, "Being mathematically certain that I am no more a fool than Lucio, I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel." In cramped cursive with a blue Biro, he wrote in lined notebooks. A pupil offered to type up the manuscript at his father's office. After buying them lunch, Lampedusa dictated the novel, smoking heavily. In the hot office it became quite apparent that he was not well.

He had never been very well. He was overweight, ate too much, didn't exercise, smoked incessantly. He had trouble breathing and thought it was emphysema. It turned out to be lung cancer. But he was stoic about it, and kept on writing whenever he felt well.

There is little comfort to be gained from the next chapter in the book. Twenty-one years have passed and Don Fabrizio is dying. Having seen a doctor on Naples, he is too ill to complete his journey to the Villa Salina. In the middle of the afternoon, he meets his family in the heat of the day at Palermo's station, collapses, and is taken to a hotel. Every word was weighted, as Lampedusa said, and Don Fabrizio's death is set in a real hotel, the Trinacria, meaning three-cornered, a Greek word for Sicily. The Prince is dying in the Hotel Sicily, surrounded by his family, listening to waves lapping on the shore. "He had said that the Salina would always be the Salina. But he had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi, that bearded Vulcan, had won after all."

In his last moments, he sees a woman approaching him. She is wearing a travelling gown, is beautiful and foxy, and he realises that this is her, this is it. "It was she, the creature forever yearned for coming to fetch him. When she was face to face with him, she raised her veil, and there, chaste but ready for possession, she looked lovelier than she ever had, when glimpsed in stellar space. The crashing of the sea subsided altogether."

On Aug 23, 1955, Lampedusa wrote in his diary that his book was finished. Now he needed to find a publisher. He knew nobody, practically nobody abroad, outside Palermo. His book was rejected twice, the second time when he was on his deathbed in a clinic in Rome. Naturally, he was depressed about it. But he said philosophically, "As a review it's not bad, but they are not going to publish it." That second letter described the novel as somewhat old fashioned, unbalanced, and too essay-ish. He was denied the solace he granted to his main character - he never returned to Palermo. The last Prince of Lampedusa died a few days later. He was sixty years old.

Months later, by a circuitous route, the manuscript came to the attention of Giorgio Bassani at the publisher Feltrinelli. He wrote to Alessandra in Palermo: "From the first page I realised that I had found myself before the work of a real writer." The book was published in November 1958 and was an immediate best-seller.

Today, not far from where he lived, one can find a cafe and bookshop dedicated to the Leopard. Inside, there are old photographs of Lampedusa. It is easy to feel sorry for the Prince: he died a few days after receiving a clumsy rejection of his manuscript, and he never knew the success his book would achieve. But in Sicily it doesn't matter that things are done well or badly. In Sicily, the only sin we cannot forgive is simply that of 'doing' at all. He had done something, and he had done it well.