The city of Alexandria played host to the renowned Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco, who gave this lecture on November 1, 2003.

“We have three types of memory. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today’s computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper.”

He argues books will continue to exist well into the future and continue to play an important role in our lives.