The Prague Cemetery

The Prague Cemetery is a 2010 novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. The English translation was released in 2011. The book was a best seller in Italy upon its release and has been called Eco’s best novel since his most famous work, The Name of the Rose. The Prague Cemetery takes place in nineteenth-century Italy and France and follows an unlikeable and cynical forger as he becomes involved with major historical events of the time.

The central character, Simone Simonini, is the only fictional character in the book, which is otherwise filled with historical figures. The novel is mostly framed as a retrospective diary written by Simone in 1897. He one day realizes that he has lost his memory and suspects that he has gone through some trauma. Recalling a conversation with a doctor who suggested talking and writing as cures for traumatic memories, Simone decides to write his life story in an attempt to regain his lost memories.

Born in Turin in 1830, Simone is brought up by his grandfather after both of his parents die while he is still a child. His grandfather is an anti-Semite who believes that the Jews orchestrated many of history’s major events through shadowy and sinister organizations such as the Illuminati, Knights Templar, and Jacobins.



Under his grandfather’s influence, Simone comes share these beliefs and develops an inherent mistrust of Jewish people. He studies law and is eventually hired by a lawyer who teaches him to forge documents. Simone becomes extremely skilled at this and is eventually recruited by the Piedmont government (at this point Italy’s many regions were still separate countries).

When Garibaldi, one of the generals who enabled the unification of Italy, invades Sicily in 1860, Simone is sent to spy on him. There, he discovers that Garibaldi’s army is made up of students, intellectuals, and professionals. This means that the support of the Sicilian peasants is due to frustrations with the Kingdom of Naples’s oppressive regime.

By siding with Garibaldi, the Sicilians hope to overthrow their abusive landlords and instate a better government. However, Garibaldi has no particular sympathy for the peasants and sides with the landlords. With Simone’s information, Piedmont reluctantly chooses to support the unification of Italy, despite worries that the process will remove all power from the region’s current king.



Later, Simone meets French novelist Alexandre Dumas—of The Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo fame—as well as Italian patriots Nino Bixio and Ippolito Nievo, both prominent figures of the unification. Under Piedmont’s orders, Simone attempts to destroy some sensitive documents in Nievo’s possession by blowing up the ship he’s sailing on. Having killed every passenger with his plan, Simone is banished to France.

The rest of the story is set in Paris after 1861. Simone starts a business as a forger while also working within the French secret service. The book follows him as he becomes embroiled in various historical plots and events in the ensuing decades, from the Paris Commune, a short-lived socialist revolution, to the Dreyfus affair, a scandal in which a Jewish captain was accused of spying for the Germans.

As the story of Simone’s life advances, it is intercut with his experiences writing it. He often spends so long writing that he collapses in exhaustion, later awakening to find that someone is adding notes to his diary. The person signs as Abbe Dalla Piccola and is mysteriously knowledgeable about the details of Simone’s life. He also adds more information about shadowy cults and organizations within the Catholic Church and introduces other historical figures to the narrative.



Back in the main story, Simone becomes moderately wealthy working as a forger in France. However, he wants enough money to retire comfortably, and so he devises one last forgery to earn this money. This forgery is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous text that was believed to detail how powerful Jews had manipulated major world events and were plotting to rule the world. Simone draws from various fictional sources, such as texts by Alexandre Dumas and other French authors, including the story of a sinister Jewish cabal that met in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery to plan world domination and dialogue with the Devil.

Simone forges the text as the real minutes from a meeting of Jewish leaders. Historically speaking, it is this pretense that led the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be quoted by Adolf Hitler as one of his main motivations for the extermination of the Jewish people. By making his central character the creator of such a document, Eco directly links the brewing anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century to the atrocities that occurred in the twentieth.

The Prague Cemetery was generally well received by reviewers, but it garnered some criticism from readers who felt that Simone’s violent hatred of Jews reinforced dangerous and harmful stereotypes. While Eco intended a certain degree of irony, Peter Conrad from The Guardian wondered how he would feel knowing that some readers could take it too seriously, concluding that “history is a nightmare, and Simonini's enfevered babbling won't help us to awaken from it.”