Each year sees hundreds of books published with advice on how to stay trim, how to grow rich, or how to develop self-confidence. While these self-help books may help a reader in the short term, they are likely to be unsatisfying, for they do little to enhance the quality of experience. But what really does make people glad to be alive? What are the inner experiences that make life worthwhile?

For more than two decades I have been travelling through Italy studying states of happiness – those experiences when people tell stories about feelings of concentration and deep enjoyment. These stories in Italy have revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness they call – la dolce vita – and the rest of us call them happiness or flow. Which is a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity whether it is painting, eating, having a conversation, playing sports or making love. Everyone experiences flow from time to time and will recognize its characteristics: People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Both the sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear, and there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence.

The Grand Tour, the Quest for Happiness reveals how this pleasurable state can, in fact, be controolled, and not just left to chance, by setting ourselves challenges – tasks that are neither too difficult nor too simple for our abilities. With such goals, we learn to order the information that enters consciousness and thereby improve the quality of our lives.

Happiness is expected to become one of the most productive areas of research during the next decade. The Grand Tour is the ideal introduction to this remarkable subject taking you on a journey to discover the true richness of everyday life. La Dolce Vita