Style and substance in this tale of the creation of Italy

A big-budget take on The Leopard’ charts the sadness of an old life slipping away as a new nation emerges. Beneath the historical sweep, writes Nick Hilton, is a tale as old as time

- Nick Hilton

It’s impossible to overstate the impact that fiction can have on the mythology of a nation. What would our understanding of British history look like, were it not for the record Shakespeare left of our late medieval kings? How would we think of the French Revolution without Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables or the US civil war without Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage? These works record history, but they also shape it – and that role is played, in the great unified nation of Italy, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel The Leopard, which arrives on our screens this week as a lavish Netflix miniseries.