Библиотека И Лабиринт. Архитектурный Комментарий К Роману “Им Розы” [The Library and the Labyrinth. Architectural Postils to The Name of the Rose]

The association between library and labyrinth is an architectural and literary topos of great charm. The library is expected to be a place able to offer an ordered representation of human knowledge, while the labyrinth is a place (or non-place?) designed to prevent and divert spatial knowledge. A labyrinth-library is therefore an oxymoron, a fantastic and impossible place that tests both the archetypes involved. At the end of the seventies, Umberto Eco began to design the setting and characters of his novel The Name of the Rose to be published in 1980. Through his sketches, he designed the plan of the whole monastery and established the shape of the Aedificium that contains the large library. The inspiration obviously came from the work of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose name also inspired that of the librarian-murderer. Eco built his architectures with great care. Fragments of monasteries, fortresses, floor labyrinths and puzzles come together to define the literary place as a sort of collage, with more explicit and other more enigmatic pieces. The library became also a sort of map of the globe as geography was to offer the key to deciphering its secret. When the Franco-German-Italian co-production bought the rights to the novel, Eco’s descriptions and drawings provided the French director Jean Jacques Annaud with only a first element to define the setting. But a movie is very different than a book and may offer different degrees of freedom and constraint. Also in this case, the cinematic place is the result of a collage of different places: some real places and some fictitious places, that were built outdoors and in cinematic theatres. The filming troupe moved from the Rocca di Calascio in Abruzzo, Italy, to near Frankfurt, Germany, into the Kloster Eberbach in Eltville-am-Rhein. At the same time, the exterior wings of the monastery were built on the hills along the Via Tiberina, Rome, to be used exclusively for outdoor shooting of the Monastery, while the internal structure of the library-labyrinth was set up inside the Cinecittà cinematic theatre. Here, the set designer Dante Ferretti revolutionized Eco’s project and imagined a truly three-dimensional library, inspired by the hexagonal cells of Borges’ Library of Babel and much more photogenic than the original one. Starting from the internal form of the labyrinth structure, he also redefined the external form of the Aedificium, albeit with a certain degree of freedom, also because the film editing always allows to conceal the spatial inconsistencies of the sets. This paper reconstructs the stages of this story and discusses about the process of creation of literary, fantastic place, the role of description in summoning mental images and their transformation during the translation from one media to another, also through original reconstructive drawings and three-dimensional digital models.