The novel is indeed the modern artistic form of the bourgeoisie, but there is no law prohibiting aristocrats from writing in another class's style; so, almost exactly a century after the unification of Italy, a Sicilian prince, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957), wrote a very successful and revealing novel, Il Gattopardo ('The Leopard', 1958) about the events that led to the decline and eventual demise of the aristocracy. Modelled on the author's grandfather, the protagonist of the book, Prince Fabrizio Salina, witnesses those events with the wisdom and detachment of his age and with a historical and sociological insight that makes him support his nephew, Tancredi Falconeri, when the latter joins the Garibaldini - 'If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change' (p. 24), he tells his worried uncle - and when he wants to marry the beautiful bourgeois Angelica Sedara instead of Concetta, the prince's own daughter.