Umberto Eco is known to the world not only as a living classic of modern literature, but also as a serious scientist - semiologist, mediaevalist, culturologist and massediologist. The new novel “Zero Number” is built on the academic foundation a comprehensive study of the work of the media. A pilot project of the newspaper is being launched in Milan, which should become another tool of political influence for the media mogul sponsoring it. But the editorial, composed of chronic losers, is not engaged in work, but in myth-making. An employee with a manic obsession gathers evidence to support his own account of what happened to Benito Mussolini in 1945 and how Allied intelligence agencies ran Europe’s political life after the war. Around the investigation plays a tense drama of love and death, happiness and fear, reality and fiction.