Mom Puts Sickly Boy to Bed in Coffin

"Antonio* was so sickly as a child that for years his mother is said to have dressed him in his best clothes every evening and laid him out to sleep in a coffin, expecting him to be dead by morning."

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Anecdote quoted from: Csikszentmihaly, Milhaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. 1st ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991, p. 234.

* Antonio Gramsci, Italian writer, activist and Marxist political theorist (1891-1937), who was jailed by Mussolini's Fascist regime. Read Wikipedia about him here.

Here's a photo of the 15 year-old Gramsci.