By Robert Royal.

"NUNC et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Glorious and the Sorrowful Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word: love, virginity, death. . ."

So begins the celebrated modern Italian novel, Il Gattopardo - in English, The Leopard, though the animal in question is, accurately translated, the "ocelot." But that name wouldn't have adequately conveyed the grandeur of the protagonist, Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, an imposing Sicilian nobleman, as the island is being invaded in the 1860s and absorbed into the emerging nation of Italy.

That the author, himself the Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, thought to place the passing of the old monarchic order and birth of a new one amid those large realities in the Ave, however, is noteworthy. I know of no other significant work of fiction that starts in a similar way. And it's even more surprising in that Lampedusa wasn't an especially Catholic writer, though he was an admirer of novelists like Graham Greene and, in complex ways, several Christian currents in history.

The greatest Italian Catholic novel, and perhaps the greatest Catholic novel ever, is Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, a book on the order of War and Peace. But it's just one indication of the subtle richness that has made The Leopard a classic that it almost imperceptibly frames earthiness and world-historical events in light of eternity, via what to many might seem just the most conventional of Catholic devotions.

The Prince is a passionate man with a mistress, a streak of religious skepticism, and a manner that intimidates people. But he also has a shadowy Catholic conscience in the family chaplain, Father Perrone, who's deferential but, at times, a true spiritual counselor.

Netflix has just brought out a six-part "adaptation" of the novel, which does not start with the Rosary or bring to life the large human questions. Like most modern stories, it overdoes sex and romantic intrigues, and it even fails to capture the great beauties of Sicily. Better to watch the older Visconti film - at half the running time - with Burt Lancaster (a real-life "leopard") as the prince. (Normally, I'd defer to noted film critic, one B. Miner, for such judgments, but I've been living with this novel since my early Italian studies, many moons ago.)

It describes a period like ours in some respects, when the whole way of life of a people is being threatened by "progress." The line most often cited from the book is pronounced by the Prince's reckless, romantic nephew, Tancredi, as he's going off to join the revolutionaries: "If we want everything to stay as it is, everything will have to change."

I've never been quite sure about what that means, and neither is the Prince. It may simply mean that Tancredi, intoxicated with radical politics, just doesn't know what he's talking about. Because things are certainly not the same after the change in regime.

Even today, some still lament that radical change. I was driving in Palermo once with a Sicilian art historian on Via della Libertà and was surprised that, like the Prince, this sophisticated man, too, deplored the conquerors from the mainland (a century-and-a-half earlier!). He claimed that they had substituted deep personal loyalty to a man (king) with shallow adherence to abstractions. Like Libertà, I asked? Yes, he said.

The Prince appears to have much deeper historical intuitions than his wild nephew:

the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery. . . .Do you really think. . .that you are the first who has hoped to canalize Sicily into the flow of universal history? I wonder how many Moslem imams, how many of King Roger's knights, how many Swabian scribes, how many Angevin Barons, how many jurist...