Lampedusa's mid-20th-Century novel The Leopard became a bestseller, then a revered film – and is now a lavish Netflix series. Its withering takedown of society's flaws and hypocrisies still hits home today.

"Dying for somebody or for something, that was perfectly normal, of course: but the person dying should know, or at least feel sure, that someone knows for whom or for what he is dying." These are some of the opening lines of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard, published in 1958, only a year after the author died of cancer.

These words are from the novel's protagonist, Prince Fabrizio, head of an aristocratic Sicilian family. He is recalling discovering the body of an unknown soldier under one of his paradisiacal villa's lemon trees. It's an image that sums up the novel's existential spirit: beneath beauty, there is rot.

Lampedusa was never published during his lifetime. His sole novel charts the fortunes of the Salina family, set against the backdrop of the Risorgimento: a social and political movement for Italian unification that led to the creation of a new kingdom of Italy in 1861, during a period of wider European revolutions. As ideas about democracy, liberalism and socialism carried throughout the continent, workers raged against the land-owning gentry, which they held responsible for worsening working conditions and widespread poverty. The period concluded in 1870 with the annexation of parts of the Italian peninsula, the unification of Italy and the capture of Rome.

In The Leopard, one such landowner, Fabrizio, strategises based on what he believes he stands to gain at this tumultuous time for the aristocracy. He orchestrates the marriage between his dashing nephew Tancredi Falconeri and the nouveau-riche Angelica Sedara – against the wishes of Fabrizio's own daughter Concetta, who is in love with Tancredi.

Considered one of the most important works of Italian literature, The Leopard was described by the cultural historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett as "the most loved and admired novel ever written in Italian". The British author EM Forster, meanwhile, in his preface to the Italian author's unfinished memoir Places of My Infancy (1971), wrote: "Lampedusa has meant so much to me that I find it impossible to present him formally… Reading and rereading it has made me realise how many ways there are of being alive." Marking only the second adaptation of the novel – and the first serialised version – a new Netflix series makes a fresh case for The Leopard's relevance in the 21st Century, more than 60 years after Luchino Visconti's classic film.

Despite its historical shrewdness and epic love story, Lampedusa's novel did not initially fare well with Italian publishers. Two major publishing houses, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore and Einaudi, swiftly rejected Lampedusa's 1956 manuscript. The influential modernist and editor Elio Vittorini claimed it was too "traditional" compared with the experimental avant-garde movement sweeping Italian literature at the time. "Conservatives didn't like it because it's very rude about the Church and it's fairly cynical about aristocrats," David Laven, a historical consultant on Netflix's adaptation, tells the BBC. "Left-wingers didn't like it because he doesn't portray a positive view of the ordinary working class."

After Lampedusa's death, his book fell into the hands of literary agent Elena Croce and eventually landed on the desk of the publisher Feltrinelli. The novel had vocal detractors, including the aforementioned Vittorini and the anti-fascist author Alberto Moravia, who were both suspicious of what they believed was the novel's conservatism, a decade after the 1943 overthrowing of the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. As Rachel Donadio wrote in The New York Times in 2008, The Leopard "was at first seen as quaint and reactionary, a baroque throwback at the height of neorealism in........

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