L'arte di essere felici

It's difficult to say what happiness is, a highly relative concept, but Mantegazza claimed to have found it. A prolific writer, author of around a hundred books (almost all successful), an anthropologist and traveler, as well as a politician on the side of the working classes, in these pages (selected from the 1886 Barbera edition), Mantegazza constructs his finest monument to the pursuit of happiness. For him, being happy perhaps depends, in large part, on the "artistic ability to be in the world," to reconstruct it time after time with our creativity. For some, happiness is simply the absence of suffering; in the most pessimistic visions, the interval between two sorrows; for others still, it is finding love. Ultimately, there is no more beautiful place than a small garden to stroll in and the immensity to fantasize: at our feet what can be cultivated and harvested, above us what can be studied and meditated upon.