 In a classroom in Newcombe Hall, what in those days was one of the sort of newfangled electronic classrooms one afternoon in teaching a course on the history of Italian literature. I projected onto the screen part of the text of Boccaccio's Decameron written in 1348, and the particular passage was a very well-known one from day four book one in which Gismonda justifies to her father, who is a prince, her taking as her lover a young man who is basically sort of assistant in the stables. And she does so by saying that our creator made us all from the same mass of flesh. We were all born equal. And it struck me at that point how over 400 years before the writing of the Declaration of the of Independence, Boccaccio had given form to many, basically the same principles, many of the same points. So because of the time I was traveling to Washington DC regularly as a delegate to the National Council of the American Association of University Professors, on the next visit I went into the Library of Congress for a book room and I asked the director who was, who is a Jefferson expert, what research there was on Jefferson's Italian books because I was interested in knowing if he might have had the occasion to read Boccaccio's text. And he looked at me rather startled and he said, well, there is none. So for about the next 15 years, as I went twice a year to Washington DC, I was able to make some time, especially in the summer, to conduct research on Jefferson's own library. And the director was also kind enough to send me a copy of the four volume catalog of Jefferson's library. And what became very clear was that he was a very sophisticated connoisseur, not only of Italian works written by Italian, Italians themselves, but by works published in Italy because Italy had been a very important publishing center through the Middle Ages and into the 18th century. And he was particularly interested in the history of philosophy and in works that had to do with self-government, both of the individual and of the political entity, and in particular in the Venetian Republic, which was the only one of the Italian medieval republics to remain in existence through the 18th century, and in fact was studied by a number of the founding fathers. And I was able to draw a number of connections between Jefferson's ideas and precepts and views about how governments should function to Italian works that he owned. Now it's something of an open question whether he already had these ideas and these works reinforced them or further developed them or if some of these particular ideas he derived from the works, but his choice of books shows his very deep interest in these topics and his very great sophistication and knowledge about them. And so I wrote a summary of my findings in the book that I published in 2019 on Thomas Jefferson's Italian and Italian Related Library. And I called it an overview because my intention and hope is that people who have greater expertise in specific areas that Jefferson collected books on will take this further and develop more of our understanding of his familiarity with Italian thought and also to demonstrate that Italian thought on many topics was at the center of developments in the West and in many ways, in many instances was also the originator of a number of concepts.