“If we want everything to continue as it is, everything must change”

Risorgimento Italiano in Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and in the Quaderni del carcere by Antonio Gramsci

Abstract

This article aims to approach the so-called Risorgimento Italiano from the works Il Gattopardo, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and Quaderni del carcere, by Antonio Gramsci. Based on the premise that literature constituted a source for the work of historians, a dialogue between a specific literary source and a political-social analysis is proposed here, with historiographical implications. The novel used in this analysis is Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, which portrays a moment of political, social and economic transformation that took place in 19th century Italy. In this literary work, the daily life of a monarchical society in decadence and the emergence of a centralized bourgeois State can be glimpsed. To compose the dialogic exercise proposed here, we use the Quaderni del carcere by the Sardo Antonio Gramsci. From these works, we seek to highlight the points of intersection between the texts so that both help in a broader understanding of what was the constitution of Italy as a National State, the Risorgimento Italiano. The intersection of these two sources makes historiographical writing possible, and provides the adoption of concepts that help in the analysis of the period, such as "passive revolution" and "transformism" proposed by Gramsci, essential for the analysis of Italian unification. The correlation between Gramsci's concepts and di Lampedusa's prose narrative is made possible with the help of György Lukács' conceptions of realism.