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a film by

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monologues from Umberto Eco’s writings by kind permission of La nave di Teseo

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A library is both symbol and reality of universal memory.

When Dante sees God in Paradise,

JANUARY 2015

how does he solve the difficult job to describe God?

He writes: “In one volume bound by Love, of which the universe is the scattered leaves”

He sees God as the library of all libraries,

a few centuries ahead of Jorge Luis Borges...

A LIBRARY OF THE WORLD

A film in three chapters and an epilogue

FEBRUARY 2016

There is sad news that just arrived. Umberto Eco has died...

What have you got there?

Today the amusement park will be closed

to celebrate the memory of Umberto Eco, the great master.

I do remember...

Actually, better than an official honor.

Do you remember this issue of “Linus” magazine?

They made this cover with him dressed as Superman, as Charlie Brown, as a Smurf...

... and as Big Belly...

Pretty much so, yes...

And they published this comic strip

where he watches his own funeral from that balcony

and he is moved...

There was this huge crowd blocking the entrance to the castle...

Oh, my god, how can I get through?

So I pushed through the crowd

saying “Please, let me pass”.

“You want to pass? We’ve all been waiting since morning!”

“Get In line like anybody else!”

So I said: “Actually, I am the widow...”

They let you in?

Not exactly, no...

Thank you, Professor

Milan, summer 2022

This is my father’s studio, in the house

that he and my mother chose 30 years ago to host the whole book library.

That is, 1,200 rare and antique books and 30,000 contemporary books.

Here is where he worked together with his collaborators.

But his shelter was the rare book room- There he played the flute

and spent time leafing through the books, without phone nor laptop...

The basic collection is:

“Bibliotheca semiologica, curiosa, lunatica magica et pneumatica”.

To explain to a librarian, I’d say: “Occult sciences”

But it’s not really like that. For instance

I have books on all the imaginary languages that were ever invented.

One of the biggest strokes of luck in my life was to have met Umberto Eco 35 years ago

He gave me two important things: one, his friendship and knowledge;

the other, access to his library.

Physiognomics, magic, alchemy

chemistry and sciences, chemical theatres...

occultism, hermetism...

- Magic... - Semiology and ensigns...

- ...hyeroglyphics... - ...astronomical sciences, demonology, alchemy...

...esotericism...

...theology and Kircher...

...Kircher... Rosicrucians...

...universal languages, linguistics, soul of the animals...

Dad never used these gloves...

Of course: books must be touched with your hands.

Talking about a big house full of books may imply a lonely man of letters

who lives secluded from the world.

The house is big otherwise I wouldn’t know where to put the books.

I was evicted from the last one after an inspection by the city engineers

because they were afraid the floors would collapse.

When I arrived 25 years ago they were 30.000... I have no more time to count them.

They are my books, translations... and they are books on me.

ONE REMEMBERING

Since books are made out of trees

and anciently from papyrus,

by “vegetal memory”, I mean the memory kept in books.

Organic memory is the one in our brain;

and, last, there’s a mineral memory that’s kept in the silicon of electronic devices.

As humans, when we say 'I', we mean our memory

Memory is soul.

There’s a parallel to individual memory

which is the library, the vegetal memory.

Libraries are mankind’s common memory

We are beings living in time.

Without memory it’s impossible to build a future.

Living in time we are like an athlete: to spring forward, we must back up first.

- Let’s say... 10 seconds - 10 seconds

But 10 seconds - do they pass fast or slow?

Look, 10 seconds tend to pass always in the same time.

Actually, let me tell you the truth:

10 seconds always pass in 10 seconds.

DO NOT HOPE TO GET RID OF BOOKS

I belong to a generation who still prefer to read on paper.

Once, during a trip to the US, I uploaded on my I-pad

the last volume of Proust’s 'Recherche'... It’s easy.

But I could not underline any passage. I could not make dog-ears,

I didn’t smear the pages with a dirty thumb... Very important things!

Sentimentally, the book is irreplaceable.

Somebody says CD-Roms and hypertexts will kill books. I don’t agree.

They will do away with those books that don’t deserve to exist.

Sometimes I thought my grandfather’s name wasn’t Umberto, but Professor Eco.

He was my only grandfather

and I had a very nice childhood thanks to him too,

him and his sense of irony.

The first book I received from him was 'Sylvie' by de Nerval

and let me say right away I still haven’t read it.

That was the first gift... the first book we read together

was “Gian Burrasca”.

I asked him to help me read it because I had to prepare a paper for school.

Something I had to do during Christmas holidays.

He did help me... basically he wrote the paper.

If my teacher back then is watching this, I do apologize.

I got top grades in all the sections he wrote, except one:

the only one I did myself, where I failed...

Hey Ric, remember this?

Yes, the dog’s testicles...

- There’s a book close by... - The one I was looking for.

They are probably the two things I most played with in this room.

Ruysch’s “Thesaurus anatomicus”...

A book I was fascinated with from the first moment I touched it.

One of the illustrations I liked the best is the skeletons’ garden...

See? Another bookmark...

He must have leafed through it one of the last times he was here.

Here they are...

- I like this one ... The weeping one. - This illustration was a way he had

to make up for not letting me see cartoons on tv.

Poor boy!

Do you know how many nightmares I had because of this?

Look... this skeleton holds a sickle in his hand

I remember one summer day in the countryside, I was a little kid

we took a walk and I found a rusted sickle.

It looked like nothing but he got all excited

because he had an excuse to teach me one more lesson on the history of sickles...

All books by your grandfather were literally eccentric

because they moved from the farthest point and the seemingly weirdest things

but eventually told you all you had to know about entire worlds...

Look at this one.

- Big Head! - Yes, that’s how we called it...

A bibliomaniac would keep his book all to himself and would never show it

because he would fear thieves from all over the world would flock to steal it.

And so he’d read it alone, at night, like Uncle Scrooge swimming in his dollars.

A bibliophile, on the contrary, would share his wonder with everybody

and he’d be proud they knew it was his

Athanasius Kircher was probably the author Umberto Eco loved more, as a collector.

A Jesuit from the 17th century,

he was an omnivorous scholar, endlessly curious.

He wrote books about anything the human mind could conceive.

Not only did he describe his subjects in words on endless pages and volumes,

he also used images to show, just to name one, hieroglyphics from old Egypt...

He completely misinterpreted them, still he built a consistent demonstration.

Or China. He heard stories from missionaries coming from the Far East and on these

he would write wonderful travelogues, without ever having being there...

Alphabets - like the ones from the tower of Babel

from where different languages originated.

Same thing for his conjectures on Noah’s ark.

And in these books Umberto Eco literally lived and thrived.

FROM ECO's WRITINGS

WHY KIRCHER?

Why are we still so fascinated by Kircher?

I’d say - for the same reasons he was wrong so many times.

For his voraciousness, his bulimia for sciences, his encyclopedic hunger.

Kircher discourses on the sun and the moon, on tides and ocean streams

on eclipses, waters, underground fires,

lakes, rivers, sources of the Nile, saltworks and mines,

fossils, metals, insects, herbs, distillation and fireworks,

spontaneous generation and panspermia...

and with the same self-assurance he tells us stories about dragons and giants.

Kircher has opinions on everything, sometimes only by hearsay,

and about everything he gives us proof, image, chart, function,

causes and effects. Kircher writes scientifically about things he totally misunderstands

but he never gives up explaining. And so it happens that his imagery,

pretending to be scientifically correct, produces the wildest run of fantasy,

so that it becomes impossible to tell truth from fiction.

It’s in the can?

Papyruses and manuscripts have survived thousands of years,

we have books made 500 years ago that look freshly printed

but we don’t know how long electronic formats will survive.

Today’s computers are not able to read what we recorded two decades ago

on prehistoric floppy disks.

90%, maybe 99% of the messages circulating in this world 'volant'

and it’s not so sure they 'maneant' (stay).

At the same time, there’s a profusion of recordings.

THE FORMS OF CONTENT

As we are having our little chit-chat here,

somebody there is already recording it.

AESTHETIC AND INFORMATION THEORY

I was told that you don’t own a cell phone.. A mobile phone.

Yes, but it’s always out

What do you mean with ‘always out’?

It’s very important because people believe to reach me and they cannot because it’s out,

it’s turned off.

Does it not defit the purpose of having it?

No, because it works as an agenda.

You take your notes...

But it’s supposed to work as a phone.

Yes, but I don’t want to receive messages and I don’t want to send messages!

At my age I have deserved the right of not receiving messages.

This world is overloaded with messages and even each of them says nothing!

So, all that is said is recorded;

APOCALYPSE POSTPONED

and, knowing it is recorded, we don’t feel any more the need to remember it.

Maybe you read that story by Borges

about a character called Funes el memorioso who remembers everything:

every leaf on every tree he has seen in his life,

all that happened to him at any given moment. He remembers everything...

Therefore, he is basically an idiot because he can’t handle it.

He’s like the web... if we knew all that’s contained on the web, we’d go crazy.

So, what is the second function of memory?

The first function is to preserve, the second one is to select.

It would be a tragedy if our memory, both individual and public,

did not decimate daily events discarding what’s useless

or too complicated to remember.

We’d all be like Funes el memorioso.

Internet is the encyclopedia according to Funes.

Everything is potentially recorded there but without tools to filter its contents.

So, this is a new challenge for mankind.

If yesterday we wanted to know as much information as possible

today, in a way, we should get rid of as much information as possible.

SEMIOTICS AND PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Till now, we all referred to a commonly accepted and shared knowledge

though we could actually challenge it on a specific issue, arguing about it.

If we do not share this common knowledge, human relationships cannot exist:

but today there’s a virtual chance that 6 billion people on the planet,

surfing individually on the net,

could come up with 6 billion individual opinions on what that knowledge is.

Which would cause a total communication black out.

THE THEORY OF THE FLAT EARTH

THE LIMITS OF INTERPRETATION

DON'T

The risk is losing our memory on account of an overload of artificial memory.

Clicking a button you can get a bibliography of 10,000 titles.

A bibliography like that is worthless,

you just throw it away.

Once, you went to the library and found 3 books.

You would read them and you would learn something.

10,000 books, on the contrary, are impossible to read.

So, you see, the moment we think we own a limitless memory,

we have lost it.

FROM ECO's WRITINGS

Text, paratext, epitext, peritext...

On these issues semiologists have been fiercely arguing for some time now.

From this point of view, there’s a book I hold particularly dear:

“A masterpiece by an unknown author”,

or, to be precise:

“A masterpiece by an unknown author”,

“happily found and published with an erudite and sophisticated commentary”

“by dr. Chrisostome Mathanasius”.

The book was printed in 1714 and the fictitious dr. Mathanasius

is actually Themiseul de St. Hyacinthe.

Themiseul de St. Hyacinthe is not particularly considered in literary history,

not even by experts of literary fools. And it’s a pity...

The masterpiece in question, to start with,

is nothing else than a folk song running for about a page and a half.

And that’s the way it goes...

Poor Colin has fallen ill and lies in bed

he suffers every hour feeling bad

he thinks of his love and cannot sleep

all night he wants to hold her and kiss her deep

The insignificance of this beginning is the same with all the rest

but on this nonsense the author builds a critical apparatus of 200 pages

with endless intertextual references, treating the silly poem as a work of art

and taking pleasure in all kinds of learned quotations.

There will be eight more editions after the first one.

The last one will consist of 643 pages

since in every new edition comments on the previous ones are added.

I believe that St. Hyacinthe attempted a brave effort at cultural critique.

He tried to cast the shadow of a doubt on the hype that, even today, is built around a book.

A kind of hype that, confusing the reader, excuses him from actually reading it.

This should make him worthy of our everlasting gratitude.

Colleagues tell me that a student was questioned about the fascist bombing at Bologna station;

since he looked uncertain, they asked him who had been sentenced for the attack.

He answered: the Bersaglieri.

I suppose that on the poor guy’s mind the image of a broken wall appeared,

the broken wall that was built in the station as a memorial,

and the image short-circuited with another one, probably seen somewhere by chance,

about the “Breccia di Porta Pia” in 1870.

THE BREAK AT PORTA PIA. TO THE ASSAULT!

Information can damage knowledge, like nowadays, with mass media and internet

because it’s too much.

Too many things together produce noise and noise is not a tool of knowledge.

In a library silence is both a duty and a necessity

Perhaps we are entering an era when real education

will not mean to supply information, but teaching to be selective with it.

“One night, when the little mole peeked out from her shelter

- This is what happened...” - “Yak!, she said, who made a drop on me?”

“Hey, was that you, pigeon?”

“No way! That’s how I do it...”

CHAPTER TWO TELLING STORIES

I did not live in a house with many books, actually the books were kept in a cabinet.

But I had a granny who, though uneducated, was an eager reader

who was registered at a circulating library.

She had me read everything, from Balzac

to cheap love novels.

Probably they were the same to her. She just loved stories.

I feel I had a full and long childhood because I stole somebody else’s memories.

I stole them from Sandokan and Yanez sailing on their prahos on the Malay rivers

from D’Artagnan duelling with Baron de Winter,

from the Phantom trying to save Diana Palmer

and even from the betrothed, escaping from Como lake...

The life you conquer with reading

does not discriminate between great literature and entertainment.

Don’t let them blackmail you into reading only important books.

I have intense, fond memories of low-rated books that made boring afternoons so exciting.

When I published “Apocalittici e integrati” is when I got interested in mass communication:

tv, comics, detective stories...

I tried to take a step,

a step to tackle certain problems concerning the role of the intellectual

and that were not fashionable in those times.

When Pop Art arrived, it became impossible to distinguish

between mass culture and culture for the happy few...

Take Peanuts...

Don’t take offense, dear, but what were we? Friends, relatives, married - or what?

To Renate, Umberto and their brave serenity with admiration and love

The human animal has the ability to imagine and to communicate absence.

And this is what being a human means. To be able to think of things that are not there.

In a word, to be able to tell stories.

FROM ECO's WRITINGS

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

A tragedy haunted my youth.

I attended university courses at Turin college

From those years I saved fond memories and a deep distaste for tuna fish.

Whoever got to the canteen in the first 30 minutes earned the right to a full menu;

whoever was late, only tuna fish.

And I was always late.

Not counting summers and Sundays, in 4 years I had 1920 tuna fish meals.

But this is not the tragedy.

It was that we were hungry for movies and plays but we had no money.

But for the theatre we found a way.

We made friends with the man in charge and he gave us a break on the admission

if we clapped our hands on command. We were a paying paid audience...

But our college closed at midnight with no exceptions

and if you were out, you stayed out.

This meant that at ten to midnight

we had to rush out of the theatre and - sorry... - sprint to the college.

Consequently, in 4 years I saw the masterpieces of world theatre...

... without the ending.

I don’t know what happened to Oedipus yet

or Pirandello’s six characters; if Hamlet decided to be or not to be...

I don’t know if Socrates took his poison,

if Othello slapped Iago and went out on a boat cruise with Desdemona,

if the Dear Hypochondriac eventually healed...

I thought I was the only one in such a predicament

but talking with my friend Paolo Fabbri I found out he has the opposite problem.

As a student, he worked in a college theatre at the box office, giving out tickets,

and most times, due to latecomers, he could go in only at the start of act II.

He would see blind King Lear holding desperately Cordelia in his arms

and he couldn’t realize who had gotten them that way.

He could not understand why Hamlet hated his uncle so much,

since he looked like a real nice guy to him.

He would see Othello raving mad

and wondered why he wanted to put such a darling wife under and not over the pillow...

So, we are looking forward to our retirement days ...

Sitting on a park bench we’ll exchange stories about endings and beginnings

with mutual surprise.

But - will we be happy?

Or we will find out we lost the innocence of living art like real life

where we enter after the parts have been assigned

and exit without knowing what will happen to other characters.

It is true that Madame Bovary committed suicide

and this will never change.

Recently, I happened to say that the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch in Constantinople

may not agree on the fact that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Son

and they will keep disagreeing till the end of time

but they are forced to agree that Clark Kent is Superman.

No exception! Fiction supplies us with a form of irrefutable truth.

You ask me if people read enough books...

We are a country that until 1950 had a huge percentage of illiterate,

people who did not speak a good Italian, even less read...

Therefore, there are certainly more readers now.

Yes, there’s a lot of people not interested in books

because they are not intellectually curious.

To be curious intellectually means to be alive.

But, believe me, there aren’t many people alive in this world.

Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat the man of La Mancha,

and that was when I saw the pendulum on the branch of Como Lake, where late the sweet birds sang,

the snows of yesteryear softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves,

Messieurs les anglais je me suis couchè de bonne heure

time by any other name is out of joint, the women come and go,

a kiss is just a kiss, and a rose is a rose is a rose, 'tu quoque alea',

a man without qualities should not ask what he can do for his country,

beauty is truth, truth is beauty, 'too many rings aroud Rosie'

because happy families are all alike,

see 'de la musique où marchent des colombes', go where the lemons blossom,

once upon a time the earth was without form, 'Licht mehr licht über alles',

Countess, what oh what is life? Names, names, names:

Julien Sorel, Lord Brummell, Pindaro, Flaubert, Disraeli, Jurassic Park, Madame de Pompadour

Smith & Wesson, Rosa Luxemburg, Archeopteryx, Matthew Mark Luke John,

Pinocchio, Justine, Thaïs the whore with the shitty fingernails,

Osteoporosis, Saint Honoré, Bactria Ecbatana Persepolis Susa Arbela,

Alexander’s rag time and the Gordian knot,

that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

If I had to describe my father’s library that’s where I’d start.

These are the feuilletons, popular novels of the 19th century

that he read as a kid and that in turn he read to us.

Here you can find...

...beautiful illustrations by great etchers

that he then used in his own novels, especially 'Prague Cemetery'...

here’s a bookmark, see...

Along this line you find French literature...

Here too...

Down here there’s Italian literature...

Going up there’s more popular fiction all the way up to comics...

But, you see, they are all interconnected subjects...

Yes, the library is organized in sections

but not in alphabetical order and actually there are sub-sections

where books moved from one to another... Well, he alone knew where books were.

It’s a living thing - not an archive, not a traditionally organized library.

These were the books he loved more,

but he was interested in everything, even the weirdest subjects.

FROM ECO's WRITINGS

FOURTH DIMENSION WRITERS

In The Foucault’s Pendulum I spoke of SPW’s...

SPW - Self Published Writers,

talents I defined “rightly unappreciated”,

refused by publishers, and so forced to print their books by themselves

producing a thriving market which remains untouched by internet.

Take the unmissable books by Carlo Cetti:

“Vices and virtues of The Betrothed” and “A Remake of The Betrothed”.

Cetti was a theorist of “Shortism”,

therefore he argues that Manzoni could have improved his novel

using one third less syllables.

Why write “Lago di Como” instead of “Lario”

and “Mezzogiorno” instead of “Sud”?

So, Cetti was able to re-write The Betrothed with only 196 pages.

“That branch of Como Lake...”.

SPWs may not only be poets or novelists, but philosophers too.

The unrivalled champion in this field is Giulio Ser-Giacomi from Ascoli Piceno.

Rightly famous is his correspondence with Albert Einstein and Pope Pio XII,

where he collected the hundreds of letters he sent to them

without, alas, ever receiving a reply.

Were you ever tempted to write a novel?

RADIO INTERVIEW, 1973

No. Two things I’m not interested in. One, sports.

I never practiced it and I never was a fan though as a kid I did go to games

and to save face I shouted “Come on!” and “Goal!”,

but they were little acts of cowardly hypocrisy.

Secondly, the novel. Sometimes I think “Yes maybe one day I will...”

A novel in form of an essay, of course...

Well, I guess so... it should be a novel that destroys the idea of a novel in itself...

You see, the thing I most hate is to sell a fiction...

“Dear friends, the winner of the 1981 Strega Prize is...

Umberto Eco with his novel The Name of the Rose”.

A friend came to me and told me she was putting together a book

of short detective stories written by non-professional authors,

like politicians and scientists. Was I interested in writing one?

If I had to write a detective story it would not be short

and it would be set in the Middle Ages.

The popularity of detective stories is due to the fact that they respond

to a deep inner need of mankind which is the same as religion.

It’s not by chance that the English call the genre the “Whodunit?”

Who is behind all this?

Anyway, I came back home and I started writing a list of monks’ names.

Then I wrote to a friend chemist and asked him if it was possible

to poison somebody while he was reading a book.

He told me how and then I destroyed the letter...

a friend or relative might have died then and they would have arrested me.

And that’s how I began to write the novel.

In spite of ads outside, don’t expect me to speak about The Name of the Rose.

I hate this book and I hope you’ll hate it too.

I wrote six novels, the last five are obviously much better

but according to Gresham’s law the most famous one is still the first.

Writing means working, to build strong structures.

A novel gets written not by your heart or genius but by saw, plane and hammer.

That is the fascinating aspect of telling a story:

to create a world, to decide our spaces, characters.

I have a lot of drawings in which for The name of the rose I designed all the faces of the monks.

For the labyrinth of the library I designed, I dont’ know, 50/60 different labyrinths.

This library is also a labyrinth,

therefore an allegory of the world, of research, of truth.

St. Gallen was one of the models for the abbey when I started drawing...

This library has a smell, like a perfume. And a sound too...

When you walk those corridors full of books everything becomes muffled

and I feel very protected there.

My collections concernes only fake books, books that say the contrary of the truth.

I don’t have Galileo Galileo but I have Tolemy,

because he was wrong about the movement of the Earth.

Recently somebody asked me: “Why do you collect only ‘fake’ books?”

Because they are much nicer! If you need to demonstrate Pythagoras’s theorem

you can get away with a few sketches.

If you need to explain weird alchemic theories you must come up with extraordinary images.

GOD’S CREATION - BASED ON DRAWINGS BY ROBERT FLUDD

Robert Fludd, basically a magician...

He built a self-declared consistent theory linking macrocosm and microcosm

through the activities of God’s creation.

One of his most curious theories

is the recorder as a metaphor of the world.

The air blown by God to give life to the sublunary world

flows through the dark pipe of the instrument

and emerges to light as musical notes.

I play very badly professionals scores.

There are people who play perfectly reduced scores for amateurs.

No, I pay badly the professional one.

So, again, you challenge yourself...

Oh, yes, if not, there is no amusement!

When I wrote my first novels at age 10

which I usually left unfinished after chapter 1,

so that myself and Schubert are the champions of unfinished masterpieces-

the first things I made and completed were the illustrations.

And now this book on legendary places...

HISTORY OF LEGENDARY LANDS AND PLACES

Legendary does not mean imaginary...

No, real places that people like Colombo set out to find, like he did with the Garden of Eden...

I mean... probably not existing, but real in the sense

that for centuries people believed in them and went to look for them.

These books are also a joy for the book collector

UNKNOWN PART

because they offer incredible maps and fantastic pictures.

I’m going to tell you something that happened when my daughter was 3.

She was watching tv and they were saying...

a certain cake was the best in the world.

I told her: “Don’t believe what they say on tv. It’s just an advertisement..”

Then the news came up and they announced: “Big snowfall in Torino”...

So she looked at me and smiled: “Not true, is it?”

“No” I replied “When it’s the news, the tv says the truth”.

Then they interviewed a minister who bragged about his job...

She goes: “It’s true, right?” “No” I say...

“When a minister talks on the news he may not tell the truth...”

I am a semiologist, I study language and languages

and the strength of language is not to say what’s there

but to describe what is not there.

FROM ECO's WRITINGS

MAYBE SHAKESPEARE WAS REALLY SHAKESPEARE?

The Bacon-Shakespeare controversy is well known to scholars and bibliophiles.

Basically, due to speculations born out of Rosicrucian studies

a suspicion arose that the true author of Shakespeare’s works

was actually Lord Francis Bacon, the philosopher.

It has been said that a low class individual like Shakespeare

could not write works of such art and depth of thought.

Shakespeare was likely to be only a front.

Many studies show that the whole opus of the Bard

is full of innuendo, ciphers, very clear cryptograms

that prove Bacon’s authorship.

An excellent demonstration of careful cryptography.

And the Bishop is invited to supper. Shakspere says:

Less popular is the opposite and symmetrical controversy: Shakespeare vs. Bacon.

How could Bacon write the titanic Shakespeare opus

and at the same time write his philosophical essays?

Only employing a front.

A second theory has therefore been developed according to which

Shakespeare, who nevertheless was a man of some capability,

had been hired by Bacon for the purpose.

Consequently, the works today ascribed to Bacon were actually written by...

William Shakespeare.

Actually, Shakespeare’s works...

could have not been written without a daily knowledge of the theatre milieu.

On the other hand, Bacon’s works

could have not been conceived without a deep knowledge of London’s cultural society.

So, the only answer is that not only Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s works

but that he physically replaced Shakespeare in the daily management of the Globe Theatre...

Therefore, Shakespeare...

or whoever people considered Shakespeare -

was actually Bacon.

And Bacon was Shakespeare!

CONCEALED AND REVEALED

THE BACON-SHAKS

BACON IS SHAKESPEARE

So, thanks to these painstaking philological studies

we can finally and certainly claim that

Shakespeare was and wasn’t Shakespeare

and Bacon was and wasn’t Bacon.

In 1860 Alexandre Dumas visited the castle of If

where Edmond Dantés, before becoming Count of Montecristo

had spent 14 years of his life, being visited in his cell by Abbè Faria.

Dumas discovered that visitors were shown the “true” cell of Montecristo

and that guides spoke of him, Faria and other characters as if they really existed.

On the contrary, the same guides

seemed to ignore that a historical figure like Mirabeau had been imprisoned there.

Therefore Dumas wrote in his diary:

“Historians only conjure up ghosts,

novelists create characters in flesh and blood”.

CHAPTER THREE LYING

Let me make a short distintion between lying and making fiction.

Because making fiction is a loyal game:

I pretend that the girl called Snowhite existed and you with me,

pretend to believe me and we play this game...

Lie, on the contrary, wants

me to make you to believe

the contrary of the truth.

OF GENERAL SEMIOTICS

I began my interest in lying back in the 70’s.

In my “A Theory of Semiotics”

I wrote that a sign is anything that can be used to lie.

A definition that became very popular.

Hence, my interest in fake.

We lie every moment in our life because there are innocent lies,

“Nice to see you!”...

”You feel very well today!”...

”Take care!”...

Then I wrote an essay on fakes that had an influence on history.

Certain fake documents caused great historical events.

The donation of Constantine...

Priest John’s letter which motivated the exploration of Asia and of Africa...

THE ART OF NAVIGATION BY THE EXCELLENT DOCTOR PIETRO DA MEDINA

SECOND BOOK WHAT IS THE SEA AND WHY IT IS CALLED THE OCEAN

The interest in fake blended with another theme I was working on:

the study of what I call “Ur-Fascism”, racism and so on.

As far as anti-Semitism is concerned I got interested in the psychology

and in the possible motivations of an anti-Semite.

And I created this character.

THE CEMETERY IN PRAGUE

You’ve invented the viliest, ugliest, most horrendous,

most disgusting, most despicable human being!”

Thank you!

You’re very welcome!

We continue to thing that the main passion moving human being is love...

Untrue!

Love is very selective because if I love you

I want nobody loves you except me, I want you to love me,

I don’t want you to love somebody else, is like that...

Hatred is generous, is warm!

You can belong to a people where all the people hate another people!

Many fake documents caused tragedies: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

All forms of racism and fundamentalism are usually based on fake sources or interpretations.

Every criminal movement in history is born out of programmed misinformation.

What I am interested in and I wrote about in 'The Foucault’s Pendulum'

is the plot paranoia. By that I mean the idea that

reality is influenced by mysterious groups who, without our knowledge, move history.

PLOT THEORY

All plot theories push public opinions to worry about imaginary dangers

taking their attention off real threats.

The plot syndrome is as old as the world

and the writer who best studied it is Karl Popper.

THE MYSTERIES OF FREEMASONRY

“The social theory of conspiracy is a direct consequence of the fading faith in God”

“which causes the question: who took his place?”

“This place is now taken by powerful men or groups”

“ominous lobbies deemed responsible for all evils we suffer”.

So, I’m reminded of an aphorism, probably by Chesterton, that goes:

“When men don’t believe in God any more, it’s not that they believe in nothing;

they believe in anything”.

Dan Brown writes for credulous readers.

Once I met him... He’s one of my characters!

He’s one of the characters of The Foucault’s Pendulum.

Dan Brown and me, we red the same books but he took them seriously.

On the contrary, I tried to give a grotesque representation of the story.

FROM ECO's WRITINGS

THE TEMESVAR CODE

Often, in my researches, I met the name of a very peculiar character: Milo Temesvar.

Albanian, exiled on account of leftism, a refugee in the USSR and then in Argentina,

where he disappeared for good.

Definitely a one-of-a-kind individual, Temesvar...

unfairly underestimated.

Temesvar warns us that in any message, even the simplest one,

like “I am here”, we must always find a hidden meaning.

By chance, I found a copy of one of his essays in Russian:

an interpretation of Leonardo’s Last Supper.

The first part is a sardonic confutation of Dan Brown’s The da Vinci Code

but what is interesting is actually the counter-theory Temesvar formulates.

Let’s consider the nature of the scene...

The apostles on the left seem to side with Christ; with Matthew, Judas Thaddeus and Simon

busy in an anxious discussion.

The ones on the right look detached, instead.

Here, Temesvar says, we are not looking at a meeting of a master with his disciples.

We are looking at a break-up.

The theme of the painting is a secession.

Who’s plotting against Christ?

There’s no doubt John looks like a woman

and his androgyny has been discussed by many for centuries

but “androgynous” doesn’t necessarily mean “feminine”, like Dan Brown claims.

John is not Mary Magdalene, he is portrayed more like a homosexual.

It is possible, Temesvar says, that John is the symbol of the same sin Leonardo felt guilty of...

Peter will soon deny Christ

but, even unwillingly, Jesus will found his church on Peter.

Jewish, Peter represents the Synagogue,

in the act of plotting with a gay man to eliminate Christ.

His vague smile looks cunning,

threatening... He holds his hand out to John

as if showing him what he must do.

Who does Judas represent, then?

His complexion is darker then the others

and Temesvar hints that he might stand for Mohamed and the Arabs in general.

In any case, and certainly, 'The Last Supper' does not tell the story it seems to tell

and that so lightly has been handed down by naïve commentators.

In the shadow, somebody has been plotting. And still is.

Milo Temesvar never existed.

He was born at the Book Fair in Frankfurt sometime in the 60’s

when a few important publishers, appalled by advances given to first novels,

decided to make up one, "Let Me Say Now", written by some Milo Temesvar

supposedly bought by American Library for 50,000 dollars.

Bompiani, for whom my father worked, told him about the hoax

and he decided to spread it to see what would happen.

The same night, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli announced he had bought Temesvar’s rights.

It was a bluff, since he did not exist.

Years later, in 'Apocalittici e integrati', my father reviewed a book by Temesvar.

A book about Borges which, of course, did not exist.

Later, he quoted him in the introduction of The Name of the Rose.

At that point, rumors spread about Temesvar.

Today, on the web, you can find sites about Temesvar

or reviews of books supposedly written by Temesvar.

In the end: Temesvar may not be real, but now he exists.

Looking for Milo Temesvar

Interview with Milo Temesvar

One is born with a certain kind of obsession.

Through the years, historical conditions and daily life can somehow modify it

but the obsession remains the same.

And mine is: “Why can I understand what others say to me?”

And there’s one more: “How do I perceive reality?”

And on top of that: “But does reality really exist?”

EPILOGUE

In the first Book of Kings, chapter 19,

when Elijah found himself in a cavern on mount Horeb to meet the Lord

“a wind blew, so fiery and powerful to sweep the mountains and to break the rocks”.

But, the Vulgate says, “non in commotione Dominus”,

the Lord was not in the earthquake.

Then there was a fire, but “Non in igne Dominus”.

The Lord was not in the fire.

You cannot find God where there is noise, God reveals himself only in silence.

God is not to be found in mass media, nor on newspapers’ front pages;

God is never on TV, God is where there is no commotion.

And this is also true for those who do not believe in God

but think that somewhere there’s a truth to unveil or a value to create.

There’s no truth or creativity in an earthquake, only in a silent search.

Umberto’s library was given to the Italian State by the Eco family

with the purpose to promote its study and knowledge

at the University Library in Bologna and at the National Braidense Library in Milan.

In order of appearance

the actors

the libraries