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, as well as funding from the University of Iowa’s Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio and from the Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology. The authors would like to acknowledge the support and mentorship of Mahrya Burnett and the staff of the Libraries and the Studio of the University of Iowa, who offered suggestions to make this textbook 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 Cinzia Blum for her help in the development and completion of this project and to Katja Liimatta, Arne Seim, and Debora Bellinzani, who gave us insight to make this textbook more impactful for our students. We want to thank Deborah Contrada, as her dedication to provide students with affordable learning materials surely inspired this project. Our friend Andrea Trucchia deserves applause for allowing us to use the beautiful photographs that introduce each unit. We would also like to acknowledge our students, whose feedback during the past two years contributed to make this textbook a useful resource for our future students and the readers who will follow them.