The latter feature as "graceful creatures" whom Lampedusa is keen to take to the cinema — at least, that is what he banters about in the letters, whose style is quaint and at the same time frivolous, a tribute to the atmosphere of Bellini, the aristocratic club in Palermo to which Lampedusa and many of his friends belonged. The Monster went to the movies often, with or without the typists, enjoying films that had not yet been shown in Italy and noting "more intimate themes, less spectacular and also less puritanical (finally some married ladies are seen with lovers)". This may have given him some encouragement in his own affairs of the heart: it was on his first visit to London that he met the aristocrat Alessandra Wolff, who became his wife a few years later. At the time of their acquaintance she was married, although separated from her husband. Whether or not the relationship was love at first sight is questionable; Lampedusa himself talks about his various romantic interests in England with old-fashioned chivalry, sometimes teasing his correspondents with passages such as this: "Of his worldly pleasures the Monster will say nothing. He gave a full description of them on a sheet which he then destroyed."
It is worth remembering that Anglophilia was far from fashionable in Mussolini's Italy. Naturally, Lampedusa represented a particular social class, and the England he knew was that of country estates, luxurious hotels and gentlemen's clubs. Firmly settled in his own milieu, he remained a devoted Anglophile. A passage describing a Pall Mall establishment Lampedusa frequented finishes: "Postulate: a Bellinian is in relation to the English Bellinians as your cat is to your genuine tiger" (these feline metaphors preceded The Leopard by 30 years). The letters contain numerous indications that Lampedusa may have been a conservative by British standards, but by those of his own country he was far from conventional.
Lampedusa's open-mindedness had its limits. In a letter from 1928, he informs his friend that he is sharing a London hotel with "a sovereign of an extensive but backward territory on the Ivory Coast". He found the presence of the African king extremely amusing, peppering his account with what he must have considered subtle jokes:
"H. M. responds with great benevolence to the Monster's bows and smiles, exposing an incredible expanse of teeth (also of ivory), perhaps imagining (with Valéry) the future fumé of roast Monster."
Lampedusa produced several works of criticism, in which he commented, in particular, on English literature. That it was the subject closest to him is reflected in Letters. In York, the author "realises why England, popularly believed to be preoccupied with selling coal and launching battleships, has produced the most sublime poets of European literature". He visits Stratford-upon-Avon to find "much peace, much serenity, much light" there and stays in the Shakespeare Hotel where, to his delight, he is given the Falstaff room.
Whenever Lampedusa turns to literature, his figure changes from an eccentric prince into a perceptive scholar who was, perhaps, born too late or too early — or, at any rate, in the wrong country. We should be grateful for the letters that, having survived and been translated into English, paint a vivid picture of the country Lampedusa would have loved to call his own.
