Character Analysis
Bendicò is Prince Fabrizio's beloved Great Dane whose main interests include sniffing people's groins and digging ups flowerbeds. But even though he's not all that well behaved, he still gives comfort to Prince Fabrizio when the old man is feeling anxious: "Bendicò in the shadow rubbed a big head against his knee. 'You see, you, Bendicò, are a bit like them, like the stars; happily incomprehensible, incapable of producing anxiety" (2.85).
For Fabrizio, dogs and stars are both better off than humans because they don't spend all day worrying about petty things like social status or making money. They just exist for the moment, which is something Fabrizio wishes he could do more of. After all, who wouldn't want to be more like this guy?
It's pretty easy for people to project all their own emotional baggage onto their pets, but the narrator backs up Fabrizio's idea that Bendicò lives for the moment when he writes,
Bendicò also found again his dear comrade in play, one who knew better than anyone else how to blow into a snout through a closed fist; but he showed his ecstasy in his own doggy way by leaping frenziedly around the room and taking no notice of his beloved. (4.11)
In other words, Bendicò only knows when he's happy. He doesn't connect this feeling to whatever's causing it—like seeing Tancredi, for example. He just likes to run and jump around.
In the final chapter of the book, we find that Bendicò has been dead for decades and Fabrizio has had him stuffed and preserved. Concetta decides to throw him out because he's gotten all mangy and dusty over the years (kind of like her royal family's legacy). In the final moments of the book, she catches sight of Bendicò from the corner of her eye and thinks,
During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant' in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust. (8.56)
She mistakes Bendicò for a live leopard, the symbol of her royal blood. But she only thinks this for a moment before remembering that it's just her old dead dog being thrown into the trash. We want to feel sorry for poor Bendicò, but the truth is that he's probably the happiest character in the book.