A newspaper committed to blackmail and mud slinging. A paranoid editor reconstructing 50 years of history against the backdrop of a plot involving the cadaver of Mussolini's double. The murder of Pope John Paul I, the CIA, and events that seem outlandish until the BBC proves them true. A fragile love story between two born losers, a failed ghostwriter, and a vulnerable girl, who specializes in celebrity gossip yet cries over the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh. And then a dead body that suddenly appears in a back alley in Milan. Set in 1922, NUMERO ZERO foreshadows the mysteries and follies of the following 20 years.

Umberto Eco tells the story of a secret agent who weaves plots, conspiracies, intrigues and attacks, and helps determine the historical and political fate of the Continent.

Yambo, a 60-ish rare book dealer who lives in Milan has suffered a loss of memory; not the kind of memory neurologists call 'semantic,' but rather his 'autobiographical' memory: he no longer knows his own name, doesn't tecognize his wife or his daughters, doesn't remember anything about his parents or his childhood. As he recovers his memory, two voids remain shrouded in fog: a terrible event he experienced during the resistance, and the vague image of a girl whom he loved at sixteen, then lost. But a relapse occurs.