Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can can reason who can read

the cow go to mcassie r w Santa Monica I'm Michael silverblatt and this is bookworm

today I'm very delighted to have us my guest, Umberto echo it's the first time that he has

been on the show and a long-awaited opportunity for me.

He is the author of five novels, of course,

the name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum,

the island of the day before, Baldolino,

and now the mysterious flame of Queen Luana.

These books are published by Harcourt. He's the author as well of many

books of essays and scholarly works, the essays including travels in hyper-reality, how to travel

with a salmon, but works about semiology, about the Middle Ages.

This new book is a book of memory,

and in certain ways it corresponds to some of the things you say

about the construction of wonder cabinets.

It seems to have in common certain ideas with the idea of memory theater.

Certainly. The memory theater and the Wunder Camer, the German wonder cabinet,

I conceived of the attic of these old mention in the countryside really as one of

those memory theatres that in the Renaissance and in Baroque era were conceived in order

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