EXCERPT It’s been a decade, and the real question for me in definitively closing the book on this project after so many years—precisely by publishing the book—is that of understanding the peculiar persistence of my commitment to it. It’s always been a landmark for me, a project I consider a great success, not in the sense that it completely achieved its aims—after all, it was put together very quickly, on the fly, in a kind of delirium, by an underresourced and overenthusiastic team—but because it seemed to open up a number of new methodological paths that still deserve to be further followed.’…