Acknowledgments

This textbook received the sponsorship of the University of Iowa’s Provost Innovation Funds through the OpenHawks Grant of the University of Iowa Libraries. The authors would like to acknowledge the support and mentorship of Mahrya Burnett and the staff of the Libraries of the University of Iowa, who offered suggestions to make this textbook functional, visually appealing, and easy to navigate.

We would like to thank the Italian cohort of colleagues at the University of Iowa. We are particularly grateful to Irene Lottini and Claudia Sartini-Rideout for their constant support and friendship. The work these colleagues did for the Elementary textbook, Piacere! is not just precursory, but also fundamental for the development and implementation of this very project.

We want to thank Deborah Contrada, as her commitment to providing students with affordable learning materials surely inspired this project.

We would also like to acknowledge our students, whose valuable feedback during the past years contributed to make this textbook a more useful resource for future learners of Italian.