The Trailer for Netflix's 'The Leopard' Brings Italy's Risorgimento to Life

Netflix is the home of several shows that have come to dominate the pop cultural landscape in recent years (Bridgerton, Stranger Things, Wednesday). However, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that the streaming service’s international offerings — at least those not named Squid Game —are too often overlooked by the average U.S. viewer. From its lush adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to popular historicals like The Empress or thorny crime dramas like The Breakthrough, Netflix boasts an impressive library of shows that are best screened with subtitles.

U.S. audiences might not notice them, but Netflix’s investment in international dramas isn’t about viewers at home. The real subscriber growth for the back half of the 2020s will be in the global sector, and Netflix is ready to step up to the next level with the arrival of The Leopard, a sweeping, ambitious period-set series that aims to rival English language hits like Downton Abbey and The Crown. Based on Il Gattopardo, the classic novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the six-part series boasts thousands of extras, custom-made costumes and furnishings, and sets recreated in meticulous detail to match the period in which it takes place.

The story is set during the nineteenth-century Risorgimento (“rising again”), encompassing Italy’s long process of becoming a unified country in response to the French & Napoleonic Wars. The process took almost 60 years and included wars, diplomatic negotiations, and military uprisings against foreign powers (one of which is a central plot of The Empress!) before the “Kingdom of Italy” was established in 1861. The Leopard follows the fictional Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, a privileged aristocrat whose family’s way of life is threatened by the growing unrest as he breaks with the expected social order to arrange a marriage between his nephew and the daughter of a wealthy middle-class Sicilian.