Word: sicilianism
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...some 25 dazzling white Saracen-style houses built by rich vacationers, plus a hotel called Les Sables Noirs. Built around a flower-filled patio, Les Sables Noirs has 25 rooms with baths or showers and a restaurant where lobster and caviar are served to candlelight and the soft Sicilian music of two local singers. Most of the waiters and maids are English or Swedish students, who work there in exchange for three months' vacation. The island's telephones are cut off from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. And those in the know enjoy the highly civilized isolation...
...Innocent XII and Mexico's Conqueror Hernando Cortes in its lineage. Pignatelli seemed an easy target: he graces Roman society's lavish dinner tables, is a jet-set sportsman, and can be tough in business: when his Ragusa field was mechanized, he fired 700 of his 850 Sicilian workers...
While wandering in the secluded garden of his Palermo estate, Don Fabrizio, a Sicilian prince, finds the corpse of a royalist soldier. It is 1860, Garibaldi and his redshirts have landed in Sicily on their way to overthrow the Bourbon monarchy in Naples, and the dead sharpshooter signals the death of a way of life. In his elegiac novel, The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa chronicles this transformation. But The Leopard is more than a retelling of aristocratic decline. It is also a voyage through the consciousness of Don Fabrizio, who struggles to make sense of the paradox presented...
...thoroughly. Bronzed from a District of Columbia jail sun lamp and sucking a juice-filled plastic lemon to soothe his sore throat, he mumbled a litany of remembered violence on the sidewalks of New York in the '30s. He described the bloody revolution among rival Neapolitan and Sicilian Cosa Nostra families in the New York-New Jersey area that took 60-odd lives with stiletto and chopper, involved intricate double and triple crosses and led to the ascendancy of Vito Genovese as the Mafia's "boss of bosses...
...within definite limits, is superb. True, his Salina never quite becomes the figure of "leonine aspect, whose fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper." But as the scenes accumulate, the character compiles impressive volume and solidity, and by film's end the grand Sicilian stands in the mind as a man whose like men shall not look upon again: one of culture's noblemen, a very imperfect gentle knight...