It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts-a talent for learning languages and a...

A 17th century Italian nobleman is marooned on an empty ship in this "astonishing intellectual journey by the author of Foucault's Pendulum ( San Francisco Chronicle ). In the year 1643, a violent storm in the South Pacific leaves Roberto della Griva shipwrecked -- on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis , he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne , anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the...

Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, such as Columbus's assumption that the world was much smaller than it is, leading him to seek out a quick route...

" . . . the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

" . . . draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship . . . raises many fascinating questions." —Language in Society

" . . . a major contribution to the field of semiotic studies." —Robert Scholes, Journal of

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Bored with their work, three Milanese editors cook up "the Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled'a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault's Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real, and when occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the...

Numero Zero is the feverish and delightfully readable tale of a ghostwriter in Milan whose work pulls him into an underworld of media politics and murderous conspiracies (involving the cadaver of Mussolini's double, naturally.) This novel is vintage Eco-corrupt newspapers, clandestine plots, imaginary histories-and will appeal to his many readers and earn him legions of new ones. Umberto Eco is the 83-year-old Italian novelist best known for the international...

Treinta años después de publicar El nombre de la rosa, Umberto Umberto Eco vuelve para mostrarnos que, en la literatura y en la vida, nada es lo que parece y nadie es quien realmente dice ser. París, 1897. Un hombre escribe sentado a una mesa en una habitación abarrotada de muebles: he aquí al capitán Simonini, un piamontés afincado en la capital francesa, que desde muy joven se dedica al noble arte de crear documentos falsos. Hombre de...