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Roberto Cotroneo. Presto con fuoco. Milan. Mondadori. 1995. 230 pages. L.25,000. ISBN 88-0440316-0.
In his second novel, Presto con fuoco, thirty-five-yearold Roberto Cotroneo treats some of the same themes that figure in The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, on whose fiction he has written an intelligent and original study, La diffidenza come sistema (1995). Like Eco, Cotroneo is interested in the elaborate and often complex systems of semiotic links that lie between signifiers and signified. In Presto con fuoco he explores this problem in regard to music, an area of artistic activity where representations of ideas and passions reach the listener only through mediations that include the score (and possible autograph behind it),...