out & about

Lampedusa in London by David Gilmour

...The eccentric Piccolo brothers were, like their cousin, talented and very unproductive intellectuals. The elder, Casimiro, took months to paint a picture of goblins in a style influenced by Arthur Rackham, while Lucio spent thirty years composing but never managing to complete a Magnificat in the style of Malipiero. In the 1950s the younger brother decided to publish his poems, Canti barocchi, which won a literary prize in Lombardy, an unexpected achievement that turned his cousin Giuseppe competitive and impelled him to write The Leopard. “Being mathematically certain”, he wrote, “that I was no more of a fool [than Lucio], I sat down at my desk and wrote a novel.”