Now, let's look at how the Earth has been used to characterize timelessness. Let's look at the Earth as a symbol of the past, and as tradition. Let's look at it among the things that have made us who we are - as something we cannot escape, that makes us human in the most essential way.
In Luchino Visconti's, "The Leopard," (1963 adaptation of Lampedusa's 1958 novel), the Sicilian landscape is characterized as a symbol of permanence. The movie takes place just before the formation of Italy, while an aristocracy comes to an end and a new Italian empire will claim a nation - in a time of inevitable change Visconti uses landscape to reassert tradition. For Sicilians of this era the landscape was a way of life. Agriculture was business, but also lifeblood. So, in Visconti's film, we see dramatic portraits of yellow mountains accompanying triumphant scores. These scenes are meant to be as grand as the history of one of the world's most powerful empires. These expansive shots of Sicily's natural environment remind us of a simpler time, or place, in which humans lived off of the Earth, not vice versa.
The physical realm, the Earth and its forces of nature, represent tradition, the past, and certainly the state of Sicily in Visconti's, "The Leopard." Throughout the story, our main man Fabrizio, notices and is compared to the Sicilian landscape, which is characterized as dusty, immemorial, and harsh. The land resists change. Not even time can affect Sicily. It is an absolute whose permanence gives identity to its people: “The term ‘countryside’ implies soil transformed by labor; but the scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily, that America of antiquity” (Lampedusa 123). Because the land is unchanging, it is familiar. Because the land is familiar, it is comfortable, and ultimately reassuring. The landscape has the power to pacify Fabrizio, and eventually he realizes that Sicilian culture, and its people, are primarily a formation of time and the Earth.
Lampedusa's book was published posthumously in 1958, though it's written about the 1860s in Sicily, just before Italy became a nation. Visconti's filmic adaptation speaks at least of an Italian nostalgia, but also some kind of mainstream reverence for the Earth. Here, we see the Earth as a symbol of our past, of a life without new technologies, or cityscapes, or neighborhoods. We see the Earth in its transcendental beauty, so characteristic of that time. Take it as a reminder of what life could be like.
