Prince of Lampedusa

The Prince of Lampedusa was a minor title in the Sicilian nobility.

The first prince of Lampedusa and Linosa was Giulio Tomasi, ancestor of the famous Italian novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who received the title from Charles II of Spain in 1630. In the 1840s, the Tomasi family sold the island to the Kingdom of Naples.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was one the last in the line and he had long contemplated writing a historical novel based on his great-grandfather, Don Giulio Fabrizio Tomasi, another Prince of Lampedusa. When the Palazzo Lampedusa in Palermo was badly damaged during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943, Tomasi sank into a lengthy depression, and began to write Il Gattopardo as a way to combat it.