This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Nations are born in blood. Italy’s Risorgimento, its uprising against its foreign rulers and their local allies, finally ended in 1871 after Rome was declared the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. It came at high cost — a series of savage intermittent civil wars over many years.
The Leopard, Netflix’s enthralling new period drama, opens in Sicily in 1860 as the Italian volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi advance on the island. The six-part series is adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel of the same name, now a classic of Italian literature.
Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, is awaiting the arrival of Garibaldi’s red-shirted revolutionaries as they sweep through the towns and villages. Respected and feared by the local peasants, Don Fabrizio and his family live in splendour in an enormous country house, attended by a legion of servants who meet their every need. Top marks to the set and costume designers for their lavish recreation of the lost world of the Italian aristocracy.
Much of the series was shot on location in Sicily and its landscapes and architecture make for a lush backdrop. Swathed in silk and linen, gliding through manicured gardens, feasting on sumptuous banquets, the prince and his family live lives of luxury unimaginable to those outside their gilded world. But how long can this arcadia last?
The redshirts, it’s clear, are bad news for the old order. Former privileges are now a handicap. Don Fabrizio, once lord of all he surveyed, is now forced to plead for a permit to visit his summer house. The civil war is shown in all its savagery. A group of revolutionary prisoners, including a young boy crying for his mother, are lined up against a wall and shot.
The Italian actor Kim Rossi Stuart delivers a stand-out performance as the beleaguered, calculating and adulterous prince. Astrid Meloni as his wife Maria simmers with rage and humiliation over his infidelities. Whilst Don Fabrizio ponders how to navigate this dangerous new world, he has a more personal dilemma to manage: his dashing — and more foresighted — nephew Tancredi has joined the revolutionaries.
Sensing which way the wind is blowing, Tancredi tells his uncle: “If we want everything to stay as it is, then everything must change.” Meanwhile, entwined with the historical and political backdrop is a passionate love triangle: Tancredi is sort of courting Concetta, Don Fabrizio’s daughter. That is, until the arrival of Angelica, a sultry beauty and daughter of the town’s mayor, Don Calogero, on the social scene.
There are some marvellous set-pieces such as Garibaldi’s Liberation Ball. The series creators know just when to zoom in on telling details — such as the reluctance of Don Fabrizio’s wife to take his hand — and when to zoom out to show the full splendour of the occasion.
The Leopard is set in a very specific time and place, yet its themes of change, loss and the need to adapt to powerful new forces are universal. Don Calogero is an arriviste from an uncultured background. Maria is open in her distaste for him and his family.
But Don Calogero’s keen business brain has led to him amassing substantial holdings — holdings that, on his death, will pass to Don Fabrizio’s family through any future marriage. Against such forces, poor loyal and decent Concetta does not stand a chance against her rival.
Her turmoil and emotional distress is movingly portrayed. The scene where Angelica and Tancredi finally get together is electric in its erotic power. Love, war, decadence, betrayal, lavish settings and sharply observed detail make this atmospheric, but also intellectually absorbing series a pleasure to watch.
Across the Adriatic during the 1990s a half-dozen new states were also born in blood as Yugoslavia collapsed into war. In The Balkans: Europe’s Forgotten Frontier, the BBC’s Europe editor Katya Adler reports across the region, sweeping through Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Romania and Albania.
Adler, who started her career reporting on the Yugoslav wars, knows her patch. She brings both insight and sensitivity to the two-part series. In Bosnia she visits the chilling memorial at Srebrenica, where in July 1995 Bosnian Serbs spent several days slaughtering 8,000 Muslim men and boys whilst the world stood by.
From there she travels to Jajce, where absurdly the local school, formerly named for Brotherhood and Unity, is now two schools, both in the same building: one follows the Bosnian Croatian syllabus, the other the Bosniak Muslim syllabus. The children, who mix freely in the playground, angrily rail against the nationalist politicians who aim to keep them divided.
Adler is an engaging guide as she deftly navigates an eclectic series of locations and encounters. She meets a pro-Putin Serbian biker gang, carefully interviews a Kosovo woman who was raped by Serb soldiers, and a teenage girl determined to leave her half-abandoned hometown in Croatia.
But there is much that is upbeat as well, as Adler enjoys a beach-side cocktail on the Albanian riviera, descends into a chromium mine, goes for a drive through Bucharest in a Romanian businessman’s red Lamborghini, and takes to the skies on a NATO patrol.
Most of all, this engaging two-parter highlights that despite the Balkans’ recent tragic history, its magnificent scenery and coastline, natural resources and entrepreneurial population still have so much to offer the rest of Europe.
