“ACKNOWLEDGMENTS” in “Burying Mussolini”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is the product of my good fortune in friends, colleagues, teachers, students, and family, in Italy and abroad.
In Predappio and its environs, a great many people made me feel welcome, put up patiently with my endless questions, and in some cases took me into their families. I owe my own family a debt of gratitude for introducing me to Predappio and its history when I was a child, in particular my Predappiesi aunt, Marisa Valbonetti, her sister Marina and family, and my cousin Massimo Gardini. My mother, Paola; my uncle Giorgio Gardini; and Federica, Gianni, Francesca, Gabriele, Marianna, and Anita have all been there from the beginning, too. In Predappio itself I found further family: Carlo Giunchi, Liliana Villatora, and their children, Eleanora and Emanuele. To Carlo, especially, this book owes an incalculable amount, as do I for his friendship. I am extremely grateful to all the many others in Predappio who gave me their time and let me into their lives, not least to Virna Giunchi for her help in securing artwork permission, and to former mayor Giorgio Frassineti.
Outside Predappio itself but deeply involved in and knowledgeable of its history, several people helped shape my thinking in this book, including Roberto Balzani, Roberto Bui, Claudia Castellucci, Miro Gori, Mario Proli, and Gianni Saporetti. I am especially grateful to Patrick Leech and his family; Patrick has not only been an invaluable intellectual interlocutor but also a patient reader and a kind and generous friend.
I am very lucky to have conducted most of the research for this book as a junior research fellow at Homerton College and in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and to have had the additional backing of a European Research Council grant on “European Parrhesias in Comparative Perspective” while doing so. My fellow researchers on that grant, Fiona Wright and Taras Fedirko, are friends and colleagues whom I am grateful to have had with me in this endeavor.
In Cambridge, Durham, and beyond, I am fortunate to have had other wonderful friends and colleagues with whom to exchange thoughts and ideas, especially Catherine Alexander, Barbara Bodenhorn, Yulia Egorova, Joe Ellis, Nicholas Evans, David Ginsborg, Robert Gordon, Sarah Green, Stephen Gundle, Leo Hopkinson, Sophia Hornbacher-Schönleber, Carrie Humphrey, Tim Jenkins, Annastiina Kallius, Webb Keane, Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Michael Lambek, Michael Lempert, Tommaso Leonardi, Hallvard Lillehammer, Nick Long, Marta de Maghalães, Jonathan Mair, Elena Miltiadis, Natalie Morningstar, Irene Peano, Anthony Pickles, Felix Ringel, Andrew Sanchez, Bob Simpson, Rupert Stasch, Alice Stefanelli, Felix Stein, Simona Storchi, Soumyha Venkatesan, and Tom Widger. I am also very grateful to Jim Lance and the staff at Cornell University Press for shepherding this manuscript though to publication.
Some portions of this book have been published in articles in American Anthropologist and Comparative Studies in Society and History, and in chapters in the following volumes I have edited or coedited: Beyond Description: Anthropologies of Explanation (2023); New Anthropologies of Italy: Politics, History, and Culture (2024); and Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power (2024). I am grateful for permission to reuse this material.
I owe a very particular debt of gratitude to those who have read parts or all of the manuscript and given their feedback: Hannah Brown, Matei Candea, Joanna Cook, Harri Englund, Michael Herzfeld, James Laidlaw, Patrick Leech, Hannah Malone, Adam Reed, Joel Robbins, Charles Stewart, and Tom Yarrow. To all of these I feel a very deep sense of gratitude for their ongoing friendship and intellectual companionship, and I cannot thank them enough for all they have done in making this book better than it would have been otherwise.
My parents, Peter and Jennifer Heywood; my daughter, Beatrice, who arrived in the world at the same time as this book; and Bertie the dog have all been great sources of support, and the person I owe not just this book but also everything else to is my wife, Joanna Cook. If there is merit in this book and in me, I know that it is thanks to her brilliance and devoted care and attention; and every day, in my own very ordinary life, I count myself the luckiest man in the world to share my ideas and that life with her.
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