Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Palermo, Sicily, December 23, 18961-Rome, Lazio, July 23, 1957) was an Italian writer, author of a single novel, The Leopard, set in the Italian Unification. Gatopardismo, or the Lampedusian adjective, has gone on to define the cynicism with which the supporters of the Old Regime conformed to the inevitable triumph of the revolution, using it for their own benefit; position coined in a lapidary phrase: That everything changes so that everything remains the same. Lampedusa was a taciturn and lonely character, spent much of his time reading and meditating, and used to say of himself that "he was a boy who liked solitude, who liked to be with things more than people".