Johnson, but the writer he loved best in the world was Shakespeare. (He and Licy, who had dogs instead of children, spoke to each pet in a different language.) His own literary style was perhaps most influenced by Montaigne, Stendhal, and Dr. He seemed to have read everything, not only in Italian but also in French and English, and to a certain extent in German, Russian, and Spanish. Part of what made him monstrous was his intense immersion in literature. Even the nickname his cousins affectionately gave him- il mostro, “the monster”-hinted at his singularity.
All that can be said with certainty is that, for most of his life, the last Prince of Lampedusa led a strange and solitary existence. Whether this lack of interest in outsiders was due to inherent shyness, aristocratic hauteur, Sicilian clannishness, or some other combination of factors is finally unknowable. Most of Lampedusa’s intimate friends were in fact relatives of one sort or another-even Licy was the stepdaughter of one of his uncles. They included his wife, Licy, a Latvian-born psychoanalyst his recently adopted heir, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi his cousin, Lucio Piccolo, a prizewinning, late-blooming poet and a few other close friends and relatives. At the time of his premature death, in 1957, at the age of sixty, only a handful of people knew that Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa had written a novel.
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