Umberto Eco is known to the world not only as a living classic of modern literature, but also as a serious scientist - a semiologist, medievalist, culturologist and mass mediaologist. The new novel “Number Zero” is built on an academic foundation - a comprehensive study of the work of the media. A pilot project of a newspaper is being launched in Milan, which should become another instrument of political influence for the media magnate sponsoring it. But the editorial board, made up of chronic losers, is not engaged in work, but in myth-making. One of the employees obsessively collects evidence to support his own version of what happened to Benito Mussolini in 1945 and how the Allied intelligence services controlled the political life of Europe after the war. An intense drama of love and death, happiness and fear, reality and fiction plays out around the investigation.