""Two welcome surprises await readers of this book: the first is simply that a nineteenth-century masterpiece of utopian literature has been made available to them in a translation that reads like an original, and the second, that a great scholar has written a user-friendly, highly sophisticated, and passionate introduction shedding light on the times of neo-positivism, its antecedents, and its legacy."" Luigi Ballerini, professor of Italian, University of California at Los Angeles ""With extraordinary critical sensitivity and depth, apparent on every page of her masterful introduction, Nicoletta Pireddu has cast Mantegazza as a visionary bent on reshaping the art of living for the future. The translation preserves intact the astonishing modernity of the original."" Giuseppe Mazzotta, Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian, Yale University