«Noi siamo dei bianchi quanto lo è lei». Il Gattopardo, l’Italia e l’alterità siciliana

Part Four of The Leopard is centred on the theme of the encounter/clash with the other: the motif is so important for the economy of the entire novel that the events narrated up to this point appear almost a prologue to this junction. The real stranger with whom, in Part Four, Salina will be confronted is the knight Aimone Chevalley di Montezuorlo, an official of what, for a few months yet, is the Kingdom of Sardinia. It is to him that Don Fabrizio will address the monologue with which the chapter concludes and which remains one of the novel's best-known, most frequently anthologised and most frequently quoted places. However, the passage on the immutable ontology of Sicilians, which one would like to see as a paradigm of negative essentialism, a distillation of Sicilianity, should be analysed more carefully, avoiding giving in to the temptation to extrapolate it from the novel and the context in which it is set.