Lampedusa’s The Leopard seems to show the perceived inadequacies of Italy’s national unification as reported by the common histories of the Risorgimento and the time after that period. The general consensus of a hindsight-based popular opinion of national unification is that it either failed or at the least did not accomplish its task on the same scale as in other European nation-states like Germany. (1) Thus what one sees in this tale are the inadequacies of Italian unification in the extremes of the new nation-state in Sicily. What then does this extremely difficult and rather unsuccessful attempt say about nationalism and national unification, especially as compared to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind?
 First, The Leopard evokes a certain cynicism towards nationalism and the genesis of a nation, especially if compared with Gone with the Wind. The national myth of uniformity in culture, language, race, etc. seems obviously implausible, as the exhaustive references in The Leopard show. (2) In comparison to the tension and hyper-nationalism commonly listed among the causes of the World Wars, Lampedusa offers a fully Modernist literary critique of the rationality, of such a tidy view of national history, particularly in Italy. Mitchell, in contrast, shows the height of the national myth, ironically expressed seventy years after the myth collapses.
In Lampedusa’s critique of Italian national unification one finds a great nostalgia, that nothing ever improved or can improve in a setting like Sicily, and a new regime only makes the reality more apparent and more tyrannical for persons in Sicily. Particularly in Father Pirrone’s visit to his hometown, Lampedusa shows the pointless nature of the outsiders’ efforts to effect change in a peculiar area of the state now known as “Italy.” Thus, ironically enough, one then finds the same situation in the South as portrayed in Gone with the Wind. Reconstruction involves an outside force trying to enforce a new way of living on a resistant populace, as the Risorgimento results in the same situation in Sicily and other areas of Italy.
Another facet of Lampedusa’s account to notice is the identification of place and person in his work. In the defective Italian nationalism of this period it seems that any appeal to “Italy” is met with disapproval or a lack of meaning. This reality becomes especially poignant in Don Fabrizio’s discussion with Don Ciccio on their small hunting expedition, as the Prince decides to press Don Ciccio on his actual political opinion as to the plebiscite. Don Ciccio reveals that he actually voted “No,” not in favor of national unification, and Don Calogero had changed his vote and others to appear as if the town were actually unanimously for national unification. Don Fabrizio realizes then that something died that day, a good faith, that maybe their opinion did matter; however, the actions of the town leaders effectively killed this “new-borne babe.” (3) There is no identification among most of the persons in the tale that identified themselves patriotically as Italians. Some see themselves as such for their own personal gain, but none contain the vital, pure substance one sees in such a person as Giuseppe Mazzini. Similarly, all the true Southerners in Gone with the Wind become damaged and ineffective in the brave new world of Reconstruction and constant change. Very few of the successful persons in 1860 can retain their positions in 1866 and beyond simply due to the loss of their world.
Thus one sees in these two novels some interesting facts of nationalism and national identity, that both can be seen as a rejection of common values of the meaning of nationalism and national unification.

(1) Some references might include Doyle, Nations Divided (pp. 39, 54, et al), Encyclopaedia Brittanica’s version of Italian history in the period <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9106448>;, or Wikipedia’s version of the story <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_It...n_the_World_Wars>;.
(2) Simply Don Fabrizio’s note of the changes in Signorina Angelica after her tenure in Florence should illustrate this point: Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (New York: Random House, 1960), Everyman’s Library Edition, p. 58).
(3) The Leopard, pp. 82-83