This novel takes place from the early sixties to 1984 between a Milanese publishing house and a Parisian museum where Foucault's pendulum is displayed. It takes place from 1943 to 1945 in a small village between Langhe and Monferrato. It takes place between 1344 and 2000 along the route of the Templari and Rosa-Croce plan for the conquest of the world. It took place entirely on the night of 23 June 1984, first standing in the periscope post office, then standing in the sentry box of the Statue of Liberty at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. It takes place the night between 26 and 27 June of the same year in the same country house that Jacopo Belbo, the protagonist, inherited from his uncle Carlo, while Pim recalls the temporal sequences mentioned above. In short: three editorial editors, in Milan, after having spent too long for authors "at their own expense" who delight in occult sciences, secret societies and cosmic conspiracies, decide to invent, without any sense of responsibility, a Plan. But someone takes them seriously.



This is the large spherical pendulum (a cable of more than 60 m to which a 28 kg sphere was attached) that was hung in 1851 by Léon Foucault (1819-68) at the dome of the Panthéon in Paris, to demonstrate with an experiment the existence of the earth's rotation. If the earth is still, the pendulum should draw a single line on the sand-covered floor (see drawing below). In the course of the experiment, the physicist let the pendulum swing and saw that he was drawing lines beneath it. Since the free oscillation plane of a pendulum does not change over time, the lines indicated that it was the ground beneath it to move. Foucault showed that the angle that grouped these lines was related to the latitude of the place. In fact, at the equator, the angle is zero and at the North Pole it is 360 °. In Italy the corner is 254 °. Why? Think of the pendulum at the North Pole: the Earth rotates beneath him making a complete turn in 24 hours, giving the impression that it is instead the pendulum to rotate. At the Equator, the rotation "is not there" because the plane of the pendulum is perpendicular to the Earth's rotation axis.