An aristocratic Sicilian prince watches the world that built his family's power dissolve around him, in a sweeping historical drama set against the arrival of Garibaldi's forces on the island.
What is The Leopard about?
As Garibaldi's campaign lands in Sicily and old certainties start to buckle, the Prince of Salina holds firmly to a code of dignity and restraint even as the social order underneath him shifts for good. He allows his favorite nephew to throw in with the incoming forces, a move that reads as both an act of family loyalty and a quiet acknowledgment that the ground has already moved. Each year the household makes its customary trip to the countryside, and this time the nephew arrives too, drawn toward the daughter of a newly wealthy local figure whose rising fortune says as much about the era as any battle does. Around the prince, an entire class watches its privileges thin out while trying, with varying degrees of grace, to hold on to what still can be held.
About the cast
Burt Lancaster carries the film as the Prince of Salina, with Alain Delon as his nephew and Claudia Cardinale as the young woman drawn into the family's orbit. Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli, Romolo Valli, Terence Hill, and Pierre Clémenti fill out a large ensemble spanning the aristocracy, the household, and the shifting world outside it.
Context & significance
Directed by Luchino Visconti and released in 1963, the production is built on a lavish scale, restaging the social collapse of the Sicilian nobility during the unification of Italy with the kind of period detail — costume, interior, and landscape — that period epics of the era were known for. Its France-Italy co-production roots gave it the resources for a story that plays out across estates, ballrooms, and open countryside rather than confining itself to a single setting.
Watching The Leopard on Ktime
The series is available with a Persian dub as well as Persian subtitles, and can be watched by logging into a free K-Time account, with the page itself readable before signing in. K-Time's Farsi-language interface and dubbed audio option make a long, dialogue-heavy historical drama like this one considerably easier to settle into for Persian-speaking viewers.