It is hard to be lazy nowadays. Our age glorifies the myth of performance, both individual and collective, filling every moment of life with actions laden with productive necessity. Succeeding in doing nothing at all is far from easy. For this reason, laziness should be asserted as a right, in the sense of resistance practised as an exercise of freedom.

Laziness has a long history which intersects on the one hand, positively, with leisure, and on the other, negatively, with sloth: there is ancestral Mediterranean laziness and the pallid version of the northern mists; there is the persistent, cultural, ethnologically stereotyped kind and the irreverent, uncaring, ruthless kind. There are entire social classes which pride themselves on their laziness, others that deride it, and others that aspire to it. Thinkers and writers with differing origins and personalities have taken it upon themselves to dictate its rules and limits.

Examining dictionaries and proverbs, fairy tales and comics, novels and films, critical essays and philosophical treatises, this book sets out to reconstruct the main types of laziness, its ancient adventures and its contemporary manifestations, reasserting its present-day relevance and importance.

«The couch is a right. Inactivity is a collective feeling, a form of protest against a society that wants us to perform more and more. The real hero is Donald Duck». Marino Niola, Robinson - La Repubblica