Mnemonics and puzzles

The strangest images and the most imaginative associations have populated mnemonics since ancient times, producing mysterious verb-visual agglomerations whose interpretation is often a gamble, in the absence of a uniform and shared code. To juggle mnemonic figures and emblems, Umberto Eco then suggests tackling them as a rebus, the key to which depends both on contextual inferences and on codified solutions, advancing into an articulated interpretative exercise that has the character of a police investigation and at the same time a game .