Everything was right in front of me and I couldn't see anything. Suddenly, everything becomes terrifyingly simple. Those books that I hadn't flipped through in years, I not only need to open them, not only need to reread them: I need to allow them to teach me something, to educate me, for good this time.

Instead of succumbing to pessimism, I want to learn to live. I will heal with philosophy, just like the ancients. To find meaning in the phrase engraved on the temple of Apollo: gnōthi sautón – what could it possibly mean? What would happen if we suddenly decided to know ourselves, as the ancient Greeks did? And if, to do this, we chose philosophers like Parmenides, Epictetus, Pyrrho, Epicurus, and Diogenes as our teachers? We might discover that, essentially, the ancient schools never completely closed...

Through a chronicle of six "philosophical" weeks, each one experienced based on the principles of a different school, Ilaria Gaspari leads us into an unusual existential experiment, sometimes seriously and sometimes hilariously. We will discover how, by obeying the obscure rules of the Pythagorean school, we can cure pathological laziness, while Zeno's paradoxes will illuminate some strange contradictions in the way we have become accustomed to evaluating the pace of our lives. And if being Epicurean isn’t as pleasant as it seems, cynicism can offer us unexpected joys.