If you're anything like us, a lot of your understanding of Sicily comes from The Godfather movies. You know: really pretty landscapes, funerals aplenty, and huge political upheaval within the mob.

And you know what? The Sicily portrayed in The Leopard isn't so different. Replace "the mob" with "Italian history" and you've got a good encapsulation of The Leopard: landscapes, death, and political upheaval.

And you know political upheaval makes for consistently awesome storytelling. Just check out the roster of TV's greatest hits. Game of Thrones might be called Weird Sex In Westeros if there wasn't a whole lot of politicking and power shifts going on. House of Cards might be called The Story of Frank Underwood: A Nice Guy Who Occasionally Eat Ribs.

The Leopard is all about how the history turns life upside down for one Sicilian aristocrat even as it changed the future of Italy. And it's no wonder The Leopard is so personal: it's actually about how Sicilian history impacted its author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Like the book's main character, Prince Fabrizio, Lampedusa was the last of the line of an old royal family from the now-defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Like Fabrizio, Lampedusa's family lost its status in Italian society when Italy first became a unified country during the Italian "Risorgimento" in 1860. The Risorgimento, or "The Resurgence," was the decades-long process that turned Italy from a bunch of tiny city-states into the unified boot that we know and love today. During this process, old royal families from the southern part of Italy lost their status and got tossed out of power.

But The Leopard, published in 1958 nearly a hundred years after the Risorgimento, isn't a fusty political tome that just lists dates and the names of generals. In fact, politics stays on the back burner during the majority of this totally politics-driven novel. The Leopard focuses on what is happening to Fabrizio's family (not that kind of family—there are some differences between The Leopard and The Godfather) and how Fabrizio deals with the fact that he's gonna die. And die he does: just like the state of The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Hey, at least he doesn't die making an orange peel into a weird set of teeth.

Like the classic kid's book says, everybody dies.

But the protagonist of The Leopard, Prince Fabrizio, is having a hard time realizing that everybody has to kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, bite the big one, and cash in their chips.

To be fair, it's not Prince Fabrizio's year. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where he's a dang prince, is going the way of the white elephant and making way for a unified Kingdom of Italy. That means that middle-aged Fabrizio is extra depressed: he's halfway to death, and his title of Prince is already six feet under.

So what does he do about it? Um, not a lot. He tries to drown his sorrows in tons o' sensual pleasure (mistresses! macking on his niece-to-be! parties!) but he also spends a bunch of time staring at the stars and wishing he was young again.

Oh, don't get us wrong. This is not a plotless book about a sad dude eating pints of ice cream and listening to mournful music. The Leopard is a novel about the transformation of Italy, and a huge, crazy revolution. There are scheming priests, hot ladies and dashing soldiers. There are parties and funerals and stuffed dogs.

But your main course of history and intrigue comes with a generous side dish of sorrow. There's a super-handy German word for this: Weltshmerz. This translates to the sorrow felt when you compare the ideal state of the world to the way it really is. Prince Fabrizio is Weltshmetzing it up big time: he's bummed about the fact that his moment in Italian history is solidly over.

Lampedusa's novel offers us a time capsule. History books can tell us what happened in the past, but historical novels can actually help us feel what the past was like. So, unlike poor Fabrizio, we can live vicariously in the past.

But reading The Leopard is going to make you not want to live in the past. This novel is about the looming, scary inevitability of death and the callous progression of history. The Leopard isn't going to make you want to sink back into your couch and refresh your newsfeed. It's going to make you want to jump up and seize the dang day… because soon enough you'll be deader than a doornail.

And we think that maybe—just maybe—that's what Lampedusa (who died before this book was published) wanted us to feel as we read The Leopard.