Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022) Movie Script
Presented by
with the support of
a Rossofuoco production
in collaboration with
with the participation of Eco family
a film by
editor
cinematography
music
original music
literary consultants
monologues from Umberto Ecos writings
by kind permission of La nave di Teseo
executive producer
produced by
directed by
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? Weve 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 fathers 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, Id say:
Occult sciences
But its 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 wouldnt
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, theres a mineral memory thats
kept in the silicon of electronic devices.
As humans, when we say 'I',
we mean our memory
Memory is soul.
Theres a parallel to individual memory
which is the library, the vegetal memory.
Libraries are mankinds common memory
We are beings living in time.
Without memory its impossible
to build a future.
Living in time we are like an athlete:
to spring forward, we must back up first.
- Lets 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 Prousts 'Recherche'...
Its easy.
But I could not underline any passage.
I could not make dog-ears,
I didnt 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 dont agree.
They will do away with those books
that dont deserve to exist.
Sometimes I thought my grandfathers name
wasnt 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 havent 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 dogs testicles...
- Theres a book close by...
- The one I was looking for.
They are probably the two things
I most played with in this room.
Ruyschs 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, thats 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 hed read it alone, at night,
like Uncle Scrooge swimming in his dollars.
A bibliophile, on the contrary, would share
his wonder with everybody
and hed 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 Noahs 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?
Id 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.
Its in the can?
Papyruses and manuscripts
have survived thousands of years,
we have books made 500 years ago
that look freshly printed
but we dont know how long
electronic formats will survive.
Todays 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 its not so sure they 'maneant' (stay).
At the same time, theres a profusion
of recordings.
THE FORMS OF CONTENAs we are having our little chit-chat here,
somebody there is already recording it.
AESTHETIC AND INFORMATION THEORY
I was told that you dont own
a cell phone.. A mobile phone.
Yes, but its always out
What do you mean with always out?
Its very important because people believe
to reach me and they cannot because its out,
its turned off.
Does it not defit the purpose of having it?
No, because it works as an agenda.
You take your notes...
But its supposed to work as a phone.
Yes, but I dont want to receive messages
and I dont 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 dont 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 cant handle it.
Hes like the web... if we knew all
thats contained on the web, wed 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
whats useless
or too complicated to remember.
Wed 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 theres 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'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, theres 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 its 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 thats 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 guys 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 its 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! Thats 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 elses memories.
I stole them from Sandokan and Yanez
sailing on their prahos on the Malay rivers
from DArtagnan 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.
Dont 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...
Dont 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 dont know what happened to Oedipus yet
or Pirandellos six characters; if Hamlet
decided to be or not to be...
I dont 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 couldnt 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 well 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, theres 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 arent
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 couch 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 o marchent des
colombes', go where the lemons blossom,
once upon a time the earth was without
form, 'Licht mehr licht ber 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, Thas the
whore with the shitty fingernails,
Osteoporosis, Saint Honor,
Bactria Ecbatana Persepolis Susa Arbela,
Alexanders 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 fathers library
thats where Id 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'...
heres a bookmark, see...
Along this line you find French literature...
Here too...
Down here theres Italian literature...
Going up theres 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.
Its 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 Foucaults Pendulum
I spoke of SPWs...
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 Im 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.
Its 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 thats how I began to write the novel.
In spite of ads outside, dont expect me
to speak about The Name of the Rose.
I hate this book and I
hope youll hate it too.
I wrote six novels, the last five
are obviously much better
but according to Greshams 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 dont 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 Pythagorass theorem
you can get away with a few sketches.
If you need to explain weird alchemic theories
you must come up with extraordinary images.
GODS 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 Gods 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 PARbecause they offer incredible maps
and fantastic pictures.
Im 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: Dont believe what they
say on tv. Its 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 its the news,
the tv says the truth.
Then they interviewed a minister
who bragged about his job...
She goes: Its 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 whats 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 Shakespeares 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 Bacons 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, Shakespeares works...
could have not been written without
a daily knowledge of the theatre milieu.
On the other hand, Bacons works
could have not been conceived without a
deep knowledge of Londons cultural society.
So, the only answer is that not only
Bacon wrote Shakespeares 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 wasnt Shakespeare
and Bacon was and wasnt Bacon.
In 1860 Alexandre Dumas
visited the castle of If
where Edmond Dants,
before becoming Count of Montecristo
had spent 14 years of his life,
being visited in his cell by Abb 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 70s.
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 Johns 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
Youve invented the viliest,
ugliest, most horrendous,
most disgusting, most
despicable human being!
Thank you!
Youre 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 dont 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 Foucaults 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, Im reminded of an aphorism,
probably by Chesterton, that goes:
When men dont believe in God any more,
its not that they believe in nothing;
they believe in anything.
Dan Brown writes for credulous readers.
Once I met him... Hes one of my characters!
Hes one of the characters
of The Foucaults 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 Leonardos
Last Supper.
The first part is a sardonic confutation
of Dan Browns The da Vinci Code
but what is interesting is actually
the counter-theory Temesvar formulates.
Lets 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.
Whos plotting against Christ?
Theres no doubt John looks like a woman
and his androgyny has been discussed
by many for centuries
but androgynous doesnt 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 nave 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 60s
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 Temesvars 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 theres 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 theres
a truth to unveil or a value to create.
Theres no truth or creativity in an
earthquake, only in a silent search.
Umbertos 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
with the support of
a Rossofuoco production
in collaboration with
with the participation of Eco family
a film by
editor
cinematography
music
original music
literary consultants
monologues from Umberto Ecos writings
by kind permission of La nave di Teseo
executive producer
produced by
directed by
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? Weve 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 fathers 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, Id say:
Occult sciences
But its 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 wouldnt
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, theres a mineral memory thats
kept in the silicon of electronic devices.
As humans, when we say 'I',
we mean our memory
Memory is soul.
Theres a parallel to individual memory
which is the library, the vegetal memory.
Libraries are mankinds common memory
We are beings living in time.
Without memory its impossible
to build a future.
Living in time we are like an athlete:
to spring forward, we must back up first.
- Lets 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 Prousts 'Recherche'...
Its easy.
But I could not underline any passage.
I could not make dog-ears,
I didnt 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 dont agree.
They will do away with those books
that dont deserve to exist.
Sometimes I thought my grandfathers name
wasnt 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 havent 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 dogs testicles...
- Theres a book close by...
- The one I was looking for.
They are probably the two things
I most played with in this room.
Ruyschs 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, thats 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 hed read it alone, at night,
like Uncle Scrooge swimming in his dollars.
A bibliophile, on the contrary, would share
his wonder with everybody
and hed 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 Noahs 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?
Id 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.
Its in the can?
Papyruses and manuscripts
have survived thousands of years,
we have books made 500 years ago
that look freshly printed
but we dont know how long
electronic formats will survive.
Todays 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 its not so sure they 'maneant' (stay).
At the same time, theres a profusion
of recordings.
THE FORMS OF CONTENAs we are having our little chit-chat here,
somebody there is already recording it.
AESTHETIC AND INFORMATION THEORY
I was told that you dont own
a cell phone.. A mobile phone.
Yes, but its always out
What do you mean with always out?
Its very important because people believe
to reach me and they cannot because its out,
its turned off.
Does it not defit the purpose of having it?
No, because it works as an agenda.
You take your notes...
But its supposed to work as a phone.
Yes, but I dont want to receive messages
and I dont 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 dont 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 cant handle it.
Hes like the web... if we knew all
thats contained on the web, wed 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
whats useless
or too complicated to remember.
Wed 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 theres 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'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, theres 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 its 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 thats 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 guys 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 its 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! Thats 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 elses memories.
I stole them from Sandokan and Yanez
sailing on their prahos on the Malay rivers
from DArtagnan 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.
Dont 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...
Dont 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 dont know what happened to Oedipus yet
or Pirandellos six characters; if Hamlet
decided to be or not to be...
I dont 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 couldnt 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 well 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, theres 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 arent
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 couch 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 o marchent des
colombes', go where the lemons blossom,
once upon a time the earth was without
form, 'Licht mehr licht ber 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, Thas the
whore with the shitty fingernails,
Osteoporosis, Saint Honor,
Bactria Ecbatana Persepolis Susa Arbela,
Alexanders 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 fathers library
thats where Id 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'...
heres a bookmark, see...
Along this line you find French literature...
Here too...
Down here theres Italian literature...
Going up theres 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.
Its 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 Foucaults Pendulum
I spoke of SPWs...
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 Im 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.
Its 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 thats how I began to write the novel.
In spite of ads outside, dont expect me
to speak about The Name of the Rose.
I hate this book and I
hope youll hate it too.
I wrote six novels, the last five
are obviously much better
but according to Greshams 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 dont 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 Pythagorass theorem
you can get away with a few sketches.
If you need to explain weird alchemic theories
you must come up with extraordinary images.
GODS 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 Gods 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 PARbecause they offer incredible maps
and fantastic pictures.
Im 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: Dont believe what they
say on tv. Its 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 its the news,
the tv says the truth.
Then they interviewed a minister
who bragged about his job...
She goes: Its 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 whats 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 Shakespeares 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 Bacons 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, Shakespeares works...
could have not been written without
a daily knowledge of the theatre milieu.
On the other hand, Bacons works
could have not been conceived without a
deep knowledge of Londons cultural society.
So, the only answer is that not only
Bacon wrote Shakespeares 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 wasnt Shakespeare
and Bacon was and wasnt Bacon.
In 1860 Alexandre Dumas
visited the castle of If
where Edmond Dants,
before becoming Count of Montecristo
had spent 14 years of his life,
being visited in his cell by Abb 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 70s.
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 Johns 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
Youve invented the viliest,
ugliest, most horrendous,
most disgusting, most
despicable human being!
Thank you!
Youre 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 dont 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 Foucaults 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, Im reminded of an aphorism,
probably by Chesterton, that goes:
When men dont believe in God any more,
its not that they believe in nothing;
they believe in anything.
Dan Brown writes for credulous readers.
Once I met him... Hes one of my characters!
Hes one of the characters
of The Foucaults 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 Leonardos
Last Supper.
The first part is a sardonic confutation
of Dan Browns The da Vinci Code
but what is interesting is actually
the counter-theory Temesvar formulates.
Lets 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.
Whos plotting against Christ?
Theres no doubt John looks like a woman
and his androgyny has been discussed
by many for centuries
but androgynous doesnt 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 nave 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 60s
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 Temesvars 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 theres 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 theres
a truth to unveil or a value to create.
Theres no truth or creativity in an
earthquake, only in a silent search.
Umbertos 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