The Carraro twins have several advantages over Bill Gates. There are two of them, and they both have naff haircuts. And they are Italian - something which Mr Gates, however many Leonardo codices he buys, will never be. With so much going for them, it was hardly surprising that these two multimedia dynamos should have beaten Microsoft into second place at the EMMA multimedia awards in Frankfurt last year. After only four years, the EMMA awards have established themselves as the international CD-ROM prize that people in the trade take seriously. And 1995's winner was the German edition of The Gospels, produced by Roberto and Gualtiero Carraro and licensed by Bertelsmann from Editel, an Italian-based multinational publisher. It took first prize in two categories: "Art and Culture" and "History and the Social Sciences". And to do that it beat off Microsoft's 500 Nations CD-ROM, describing the culture and history of Native Americans, which was designed and narrated by Kevin Costner, as well as products from Philips Media and other muscle-bound corporations.
The Carraro twins are neither flash, big-company executives nor flashier movie stars. Their haircuts, and their equally naff suits, make the twins look as if they might be involved in some cult that proselytises door-to-door. But their cult is multimedia, and they bring to it all the evangelical fervour of the true believer. Sit them down to talk to them for a few minutes and they will motor-mouth from Ramón Llull's Ars Magna - a 13th century work describing how Llull's revelation changed his ideas about the attributes of the Godhead - to Noam Chomsky. Interspersed amid the erudition are such sweeping pronouncements as "Multimedia has the power to recreate the global vision of the Renaissance." You have to be good to talk like this and get away with it. And, as the EMMA award has recognised, these guys are.
What marks the terrible twins out from their multimedia rivals is a very European commitment to Art, Culture, History and other Big Subjects. Apart from The Gospels, titles authored by the Carraro multimedia factory include such blockbusters as The Divine Comedy (their first, from 1988), The Odyssey and The Pope. Editel publishes them all, with distributors Sacis providing extra financial ballast - particularly in the case of The Pope, their most successful product to date, having sold close on 100,000 copies. The idea, says Gualtiero, is to give new life to cultural institutions and traditions by transferring them to the new media: "We have to back up the past before we start working on the future."
The Carraro twins are 33 - but Roberto emerged a few minutes before his brother. In fact, his smug, I-was-here-first grin is the only way to tell the two apart. Gualtiero has always had a complex about coming second, Roberto jokes. Gualtiero takes this philosophically - as well he might. As in any double act worth its salt, the twins play off each other. Gualtiero, who taught high school philosophy before dedicating himself to shiny silver discs, is the straight man and conceptualist; Roberto, who studied at the Brera in Milan, Italy's leading academy of fine art, is the funny-man artist. Like all identical twins, they understand each other so profoundly it's almost boring. If one leaves a sentence trailing, the other takes it up smoothly before it has time to hit the ground. Having lunch with them is an exhausting experience.
Other members of the brothers' Studio Carraro, the firm with which they have authored 15 CD-ROM titles since 1989, are used to the pace. They should be. Most of them are family, too. The brothers work from home in the village of Palazzolo sull Oglio, which nestles on the edge of the flat, foggy Po basin, midway between Bergamo and Brescia. Gualtiero envisages the concept of each title and decides upon the links between text and images. Roberto concentrates on the design of the interface and the individual icons. At a later stage, younger brother Marco brings his musical training to bear on the project - for the CD-ROM based on Homer's Odyssey, Marco unearthed fragments of ancient Greek music, decrypted the notation and studied their correspondence to mood and movement. The twins have roped in their wives, Emanuela and Graziella, and a couple of old school friends to run the business side of the operation. With their children scampering about the house and office, the Carraros are shaping up to be the Family Von Trapp of multimedia.
The Gospels is a good example of the Carraro approach. First, says Roberto, you need to find an appropriate metaphor, flexible enough to carry the whole subject and exciting enough to capture the imagination of the user. For The Gospels, they hit upon the cathedral, which Roberto refers to as the first multimedia edifice. Real cathedrals contain music, art and text - both written and spoken - and, during the Middle Ages, imaginary ones also served extensively as mnemonic devices. If you wanted to remember something, you simply put it into the appropriate room in your mental cathedral. In the Carraro's CD-ROM cathedral, a mouse click on the windows leads naturally into rooms such as Symbolum, Musica, Pictura and Geographia.
Once the metaphor is in place, the Carraros move on to iconographic research in picture libraries, museums and churches. Wherever possible, they've illustrated passages from the four Sinoptic Gospels using paintings from the great age of Italian sacred art, from Giotto to Caravaggio. They've used authentic icons from the early Christian and Medieval repertoire to mark toolbar options. They've assembled images from marble reliefs in the Symbolum section: clicking on the star icon takes you to the relevant passages on the Nativity in Matthew, from which you can then leap to Giotto's depiction of the scene in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua while a Bach cantata plays in the background. "We try to offer more than just a pretty soundtrack," comments Roberto. The Gospels contains no video. "What does video have to do with sacred art?" Roberto asks. "The product must have an artistic unity based on an idea of appropriateness - there's no point using video just because you can." There was also the Vatican to keep happy: animating the raising of Lazarus is not going to get the Curia behind you. In the event, the CD-ROM went down so well with the Church that the Italian Bishops Conference gave it their seal of approval. "What really impressed the prelates who saw it," explains Roberto, "was the lack of comment on the text - which would have been heretical. But this is the true nature of multimedia: the frame and the links should provide sufficient comment in themselves."
For The Odyssey, though, animation was declared kosher. The big idea here was to emphasise the connection between Homer's text and the scenes that Greek red- and black-figure vases depict. The Carraros used a simplified archive of thousands of such images, both to illustrate relevant passages of Ulysses' adventures, and to construct simple, flick-page-style animations of archaic Greek dance steps, for instance. As Roberto points out, Greek vases use art both as line drawing and as a narrative form, with a clear idea of the importance of sequence - and these two essential traits of Greek vase art positively invite their use as animation. But for all the popular appeal of its animation, the CD also well serves serious scholars: it provides the complete Greek text of Homer's Odyssey, together with a word-search facility that lets researchers use the product as a concordance.
In the near future, the Carraros plan to pursue one of their pet projects: the search for a universal language of signs. Indeed, it was this search which first propelled the twins towards multimedia. A project on visual alphabets they presented at the Venice Art Biennale in 1986 attracted the attention of computer guru Giovanni Degli Antoni, head of Milan University's Information Science Department, who included the twins in his Hypertext User Group.
The twins' involvement in commercial multimedia production forced them to shelve their universal language research. But it has never left their hearts, nor their spare hours. Says Roberto: "I was working on distilling icons out of Palaeolithic graffiti, Chinese ideograms and Egyptian hieroglyphs before I'd even heard of Apple or Windows. And Windows-style icons are certainly not the only possible answer to the problem. I'm convinced that a new visual language can be found in the past - especially in the distant past, when there was a point of almost genetic convergence across vast geographic spaces." As soon as they clear a space in their schedule, the Carraros plan to apply their system of 3,000 signs and Latin- and Greek-root terms to designing a universal Net browser interface.
But for the moment the twins' current venture - a multimedia project about antique sculpture - engages most of their time and energy. In addition to cataloguing the sculptures of antiquity, the CD-ROM will enable users to put the arms and legs back on classical statues and colour them in. "Few people realise that almost all Greek and Roman statues were originally polychromic," says Roberto. "This is one of the great uses of multimedia: it helps you to see the past more clearly." Next on their agenda is a CD-ROM on the history of Christianity.
Meanwhile - as was only to be expected - Bill Gates is courting his two award-winning rivals for an as-yet-unnamed Microsoft CD-ROM title. As the saying goes: if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.
Lee Marshall (leeanne@mbox.vol.it) is a freelance writer based in Rome. He is in urgent need of a haircut.