The Leopard (Italian: Il Gattopardo) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is the principal character of this great book. He is an aristocrat in transition. 
Don Fabrizio's life spanned the time of princes and kings to rise of democracy. While the book shows the opulence of the lives of Don Fabrizio, it also shows his acceptance of the new world that was developing after the Garibaldi revolution and uniting of the city-states of Italy.
The Leopard is slow at times but more than makes up for these sections in the beauty of language and portrait of Sicilian society that is drawn. From what I have read, it is truly a poetic masterpiece in the original Italian. For example, the following is an English description of Don Fabrizio:
". . . in his blood also fermented other German strains particularly disturbing to a Sicilian aristocrat in the year 1860, however attractive his fair skin and hair amid all that olive and black: an authoritarian temperament, a certain rigidity in morals and a propensity for abstract ideas; these in the relaxing atmosphere of Palermo society, had changed respectively into capricious arrogance, recurring moral scruples, and contempt for his own relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to him mere driftwood in the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism . .. Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jovelike frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make any move toward saving it."
Not knowing Italian, I can just guess that this passage is far more melodius and beautiful in the original language.
I now look forward to the movie which I will discuss in my Movie section.