Booth Shares Title

The success of the many Scandinavian and Oriental books dedicated to recipes for happiness – hygge, lagom, ikigai, wabi sabi, kintsugi, forest bathing… – demonstrate that we are all on the lookout for advice on how to live well and, in recent years, we have learned that it is much better to add value to what we already have and to rediscover simple pleasures rather than to chase fitfully after a consumeristic and ultimately illusory ideal of happiness. In truth this approach to life has always been part of the heritage of the Mediterranean peoples and has found its image and a perfect synthesis in the noble philosophical tradition of Epicureanism. Over the course of the centuries the content of this doctrine has often been misinterpreted and this has led to the spread of a distorted vision of Epicure’s work, which has been erroneously associated with a materialistic conception of life, reduced to an ideal of mere egoistic hedonism. Epicurean thought is not this at all. It was born in the garden of a lovely small Athenian house that the philosopher shared with the love of his life and it represents a true “Mediterranean diet for happiness”, through the invitation to sharing, to moderation and to enjoying the present moment and the simplest of pleasures. Freeing herself of her reverential respect and dusting off the texts crystallized in translations from another epoch, Angela Lombardo proposes a passionate and compelling rereading of the founding texts of this philosophical tradition, which on the one hand aims to give new lustre to the poetry and the irony and, on the other, leads them into dialogue with contemporary culture and some crucial themes of life today.