Dear reader, have ashort break now, please. Take a tour in your city, enter the bookshops and letyour eyes find the royal blue cover of the book on one of the many shelves.Afterwards, enjoy the young lady on it. You will notice the white title, thanthe author, printed in golden letters.You will surely beexcited, you will undoubtedly feel that this book is an invitation to anadventure, Umberto Eco offers himself to be your mentor, your Virgil, but notin Hell, but in European Beauty's Empire. Above all, whatdoes beauty mean? Well, if you accept the invitation, Umberto Eco willcertainly give you a lot of aesthetical, philosophical, religious andpsychological explanations to that. He will show you all the ideals which haveever preoccupied the Europeans' phantasy, he will quote authors of all times inorder to give you an idea about how did they percieve the notion of beauty, finally he will certainly reflect on several causes of theappearance of one or another ideal, too.The History ofBeauty is a book that must be percieved with almost all the senses, it is atotally empirical book, similar to beauty itself; so you may read it and see itand touch it and smell it in order to know it, thus you will become three-timeas rich as you were before: you will have the possibility to see all varietiesof beauty, from the Ancient Greek sculptures to the very actual beauty-ideal ofthe consumer mankind.
As you have probably noticed, dear reader, i was typing mankind, not European community. It would have been uselessto speak about Europe when arriving to the starting point of the 21.century, and you will probably agree with me after reading the book. Inthe actual aesthetical taste presented in the last chapter, which reflects on themedia beauty, you, dear reader, and i, and we all will recognize our own taste,no matter where you or i live. Therefore, arriving to present, it becomesmeaningless to speak separately about European community and its ideals,because actually a new, universally desired beauty-ideal seems to get a shape: that of unity.