Scene from Hannibal, Season Two, Episode 13. Hannibal explains what his Memory Palace is to Will. They are in Hannibal's study and they are burning Hannibal's patients records. Begin Scene "When we are gone from this life, Jack Crawford and the FBI behind us, I will always have this place." Hannibal says. "In your Memory Palace." Will responds. "My palace is vast", Hannibal replies, "Even by Mid Evil standards. The foyer is the Norman Chapel in Palermo, severe, beautiful and timeless, with a single reminder of mortality - a skull, graven in the floor." End Scene A much more informative excerpt from Hannibal the book, by author Thomas Harris: Begin Excerpt The memory palace was mnemonic system well known to ancient scholars and much information was preserved in them through the Dark Ages while Vandals burned the books. Like scholars before him, Dr. Lecter stores an enormous amount of information keyed to objects in his thousand rooms, but unlike the ancients, Dr. Lecter has a second purpose for his palace; sometimes he lives there. He has passed years among it's exquisite collections, while his body lay bound on a violent ward with screams buzzing the steel bars like hell's on harp. Hannibal Lecter's palace is vast, even by swift slippers of his mind pass from the foyer into the Great Hall of Seasons. The palace is built according to the rules discovered by Simonides of Ceos and elaborated by Cicero four hundred years later; it is airy, high-ceilinged, furnished with objects and tableaux that are vivid, striking, sometimes shocking and absurd, and often beautiful. The displays are well spaced and well lighted like those of a great museum. But the walls are not the neutral colors of museum walls. Like Ciotto, Dr. Lecter has frescoed the walls of his mind. He has decided to pick up Clarice Starling's home address while he is in the palace, but he is in no hurry for it, so he stops at the foot of a great staircase where the Riace bronzes stand. These great bronze warriors attributed to Phidias, raised from the seafloor in our own time, are the centerpiece of a frescoes space that could unspool all of Homer and Sophocles. Dr.Lecter could have the bronze faces speak meleager if he wished, but today he only wants to look at them. A thousand rooms, miles of corridors, hundreds of facts attached to each object furnishing each room, a pleasant respite awaiting Dr.Lecter whenever he chooses to retire there. But this we share with the doctor: In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor-the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases- things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior. Fearfully and wonderfully made, we follow as he moves with a swift light stride along the corridor of his own making, through a scent gardenias, the presence of great sculpture pressing on us, and the light of pictures..." "...Dr. Lecter can move down the vast halls of his memory palace with unnatural speed. With his reflexes and strength, apprehensive and speed of mind, Dr. lecter is well armed against the physical world. But there are places within himself that he may not safely go, where Cicero's rules of logic, of ordered space and light do not apply..." End Excerpt If you have not read the books (and many have not), you may find this page very enlightening. So often one has wondered how it is that Hannibal can stand for hours, even days on end, without speaking to anyone. Like Will Graham's stream where we often found him fishing, while imprisoned, where those outside of his mind carry on conversations with him, you can see now, that Hannibal Lecters Memory Palace is on a much much larger scale. But then again, he has had many more years of solitude to create such a massive storage unit in his mind. Hannibal made mention that if he were caught and was forced into prison, the chances of anyone really seeing him, or interacting with him are nil. He can and does live for years in his Palace and that is something that no amount of drugs or psychiatry could ever take away from this extraordinary man.