Umberto Eco's novel Il pendolo di Foucault (1988) is an immensely ambitious, multi-layered and allusive book. The film contains an initial account and examination of this new book, which is as contentious as it is controversial. Eco's publisher and prominent Italian critics have their say and, of course, the author. He talks about the eight years of work on the book, about the two central images that stand at the beginning of his novel, and about what this story of magic, occultism, and delusion has to do with us and our present.