Moridgie tavern
Braggadocio introduced Colonna into the world of Milan, which Colonna did not know. One of such places was tavern called “Moridgie”, which stood more than one hundred years and survived through the “severe bombing” of the Second World War. When they entered this tavern Colonna saw the hall with red walls. “An old wrought iron chandelier hung under a flaky ceiling, and a deer head stuck behind the counter”. The walls also are decorated by “hundreds of dusty wine bottles”. There were rough wooden tables in the tavern. Umberto Eco was an expert in the culture of the Middle Ages, and the image of such a tavern gives an impression of the good old inn.
Report number 7241
In the course of his investigation Baggadocio dug up the report of dissection of Benito Mussonili’s body. Its number was 7241. The very specific description of the mutilated body is given in the novel. The face “bears multiple lesion shots”, thus to measure the size of the head is difficult “due to traumatic distortion” and “due to deformities and fractures of the craniofacial bones”. The skull is deformed. The “parietal part of the fronto-parietal-occipital region is pressed”, “eye orbit is crushed” from the same side, “eyeball is flattened and torn”. The image of Mussolini’s body after his death shows how much hatred had been flown on his dead body.
"Hyperbolizing"
Baggadocio used to share with colonna about different things concerning his family as well. In one of such talks he says that his father did not believe in the words of anti-fascists during and after the WWII. He said that “anti-fascists in their desire to condemn fascism overdone on the part of horrors”, surely he did not justify the fascism in no way. The fact that “over 6 million Jews died in the camps” was much hyperbolized, in Baggadocio’s father’s strange opinion, and that a heap in “one hundred meters in height of clothes” have been burned in the centre of a camp (as a cone of a hundred meters in diameter will far exceed the size of the camp). What Colonna believes in is that “people who have experienced something terrible tend to hyperbolize”.
