The obscenity investigation into "The Da Vinci Code" was dropped a day after it was launched, as the state attorney in the Italian port village of Civitavecchia it is no longer looking into the charges.

It was announced Monday that a criminal investigation had been launched into whether the 2006 film based on the best-selling Dan Brown novel was in violation of Article 528 of Italy's penal code. If found guilty of the charges, Brown, director Ron Howard and eight other defendants could have been subject to unlimited fines and jail time.

The investigation was reportedly based on complaints from clergy in the area, who alleged that the film was "obscene" from a religious perspective. But on Tuesday, the process was dropped.

While the local media speculated that the change of course may have been sparked by all the negative publicity for the town 40 miles north of Rome -- the story was widely reported in the international media -- an official answering the phone at the state attorney's office said the decision was made based on the merits of the case. "There are no grounds for this investigation," the official said.

Forget the nuclear program, wiping Israel off the map or going off to fight alongside Hezbollah. What Iranians really want is "The Da Vinci Code." According to Al-Jazeera, Iranians are desperately scooping up whatever copies they can find of the tale of a married Jewish couple who had a child, after a government ban clamped down on sales.

"I rushed to buy the book when I heard about the ban," said Reza Mortazavi, a 32-year-old teacher, quoted in the Al-Jazeera report. "Now, I am more eager to know what was written in it."

On Wednesday, Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance announced it was banning further printing and distribution of the book, which has already gone through 8 printings in Farsi, after Christian clerics protested against it. Mansour Jamshir, a bookstore owner, said: "I had several calls for purchase of the book in a bulk amount and in higher prices."

Earlier this month, Iranian Christian bishops condemned the book, saying it insulted their religion, and asked the Islamic government to ban publishers from printing it. Less than 0.2 percent of Iran's nearly 69 million people are Christian.

The Asti Spumante Code parallels the Da Vinci plot. There is a hero (Jim Crack) and a heroine (Emily) who are trying to figure out a code. Well, kind of a code.

It's more, really, a barcode or a product code, the kind usually found on the back cover of a book.

And instead of searching for the Holy Grail, they're looking for the greatest book that will ever be written.

As Jim explains to Emily, there was once a "more innocent age" before chick lit.

This was an age "when writers wrote books that both men and women read. Some of the earlier writers are a bit obscure, but think Charles Dickens. Think Jane Austen. Think Henry James."

Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who was considered a candidate for pope last year, made his strong comments in a documentary called "The Da Vinci Code-A Masterful Deception." Arinze's appeal came some 10 days after another Vatican cardinal called for a boycott of the film. Both cardinals asserted that other religions would never stand for offences against their beliefs and that Christians should get tough.

"Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget," Arinze said in the documentary made by Rome film maker Mario Biasetti for Rome Reports, a Catholic film agency specializing in religious affairs. "Sometimes it is our duty to do something practical. So it is not I who will tell all Christians what to do but some know legal means which can be taken in order to get the other person to respect the rights of others," Arinze said. "This is one of the fundamental human rights: that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected," he said, without elaborating on what legal means he had in mind.

A transcript of the documentary, due to be screened in Rome later this month just before the release of the film version of the best-selling book at the Cannes Film Festival, was made available to Reuters. The book, written by Dan Brown, has sold more than 40 million copies. The novel is an international murder mystery centered on attempts to uncover a secret about the life of Christ that a clandestine society has tried to protect for centuries. The central tenet of the book is that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children.

"Those who blaspheme Christ and get away with it are exploiting the Christian readiness to forgive and to love even those who insult us. There are some other religions which if you insult their founder they will not be just talking. They will make it painfully clear to you," Arinze said. This appeared to be a reference to protests by Muslims around the world over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

The Vatican stepped up its offensive against "The Da Vinci Code" on Friday when a top official close to Pope Benedict blasted the book as full of anti-Christian lies and urged Catholics to boycott the film.

The latest broadside came from Archbishop Angelo Amato, the number two official in the Vatican doctrinal office which was headed by Pope Benedict until his election last year. Amato, addressing a Catholic conference in Rome, called the book "stridently anti-Christian .. full of calumnies, offences and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the Church."

He added: "I hope that you all will boycott the film."

The movie, which is being released by Sony Pictures division Columbia Pictures, stars Tom Hanks and premieres next month at the Cannes film festival in France. Sony Pictures is the media wing of Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp. Amato said the book, written by Dan Brown, had been hugely successful around the world thanks in part to what he called "the extreme cultural poverty on the part of a good number of the Christian faithful."

Yes, there are still people who haven't read The Da Vinci Code. But the number seems to be shrinking. Dan Brown's international sensation has sold around 1.4 million copies in its first month as a paperback release, a big number for any book and astonishing for a novel that's already sold more than 40 million copies in hardcover.

"There are more than 300 million people in the United States, so we still have a lot of potential sales out there," joked Russell Perreault, vice president and director of publicity for Vintage Books and Anchor Books, paperback imprints of Random House Inc.

Perreault said Tuesday that he expects sales to remain strong thanks largely to the upcoming movie version, starring Tom Hanks and scheduled to come out May 19. The Da Vinci Code had an initial paperback printing of 5 million copies, but that was soon raised to 6 million.

It was second legal victory for Brown this month, after a London court rejected the charges that he plagiarized another book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. In the New York case, author Lewis Perdue had claimed Brown's book infringed the copyright of his novels Daughter of God, which was published in 2000, and The Da Vinci Legacy, which came out in 1983.

Last August, Judge George Daniels of U.S. District Court in New York concluded: "A reasonable average lay observer would not conclude that The Da Vinci Code is substantially similar to Daughter of God." "Any slightly similar elements are on the level of generalized or otherwise unprotectable ideas," he said, adding that copyright did not protect an idea, but only the expression of an idea.

Brown's publisher, Doubleday, said in a statement that the federal appeals court in New York had confirmed that ruling this week, the news service reported. "This rapid and unanimous verdict confirms, once again, that this claim never had any merit," Brown said in the statement.

The High Court threw out a breach of copyright claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh over The Da Vinci Code. That has left them with a bill of £350,000 in costs. They have been refused leave to appeal. Random House, publishers of both The Da Vinci Code and Baigent and Leigh's earlier book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, was in the dock.

After the hearing, Brown said the case had been "utterly without merit". "I'm still astonished these two authors chose to file this suit at all," he said. The Holy Blood, published in 1982, was based on a theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, had a child and the bloodline continues to this day. Baigent and Leigh say a secret society is protecting their heirs against wicked conspiracies enacted by the Church - a similar theme to the one explored in Brown's mega-seller.

But Mr Justice Peter Smith ruled that Mr Brown did not copy the central theme for his novel from the earlier book. The Da Vinci Code won best book at last year's British Book Awards and has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, earning the author £45m in one year. It sold half a million copies in its first week of paperback release in the US, boosted by the trial, say industry watchers. If the trial had gone the other way, the long-awaited film of the book may have been put on hold. Its May release now goes ahead.

[Brown] insisted the claimants' work "was not a crucial or important text" in the creation of the framework of The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, adding that he was "shocked" by the claims. He said "many" books dealt with the idea that Jesus had been married to Mary Magdalene, that the couple had had a child and that the bloodline survives to the present day. He said he had read almost 30 other books relevant to the subject and more than 300 documents.

"I had never heard of it [The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail] until I'd seen it mentioned in some of our other research books," he said; allegations that he had plagiarised the book, or "hijacked and exploited" it, were "simply untrue".

Mr Brown said he had gone out of his way to mention the book's authors, who he admitted had "brought the [Mary Magdalene] theory to mainstream attention". In his novel, Mr Brown said he named a character after the authors: Sir Leigh Teabing, an anagram of "Baigent" and "Leigh".

He said he inserted the names in his novels only of people whom he respected or cared for. Other authors whose works he mentioned had sent letters of thanks, Mr Brown said, but the plaintiffs had made allegations that contained "numerous sweeping statements which seem to me to be completely fanciful". Mr Brown, dressed in a dark suit and yellow tie, said his novel had been written after joint research by himself and his wife at their home in Exeter, in his native New Hampshire. The couple met in California when he was a songwriter, before he became a full-time author. They married in 1997.

Today the author appeared composed on the stand, only occasionally showing traces of impatience with the questioning of Rayner James, the counsel for the claimants, about documents and dates. "It is as if you have asked me to go back five years or 10 years and asked me not only what I got for Christmas, but what order I opened the presents," Mr Brown said, admitting he could not recall the date he "learned that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute".

Nothing less than the future of Western literature is at stake in the High Court tomorrow. Or so the publisher of The Da Vinci Code, the money-spinning blockbuster by Dan Brown, is expected to argue in a ground-breaking trial. Brown, whose tale of clerical conspiracy and murder has become the bestselling hardback adult novel of all time, is accused of plundering his plot from a non-fiction work called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who co-wrote the book with Henry Lincoln, claim that Brown plagiarised 'the whole jigsaw puzzle' of their decade's worth of research - that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child, founding a bloodline that was protected by the Knights Templar. If they win, the historians will seek an injunction preventing further infringement of their copyright. In theory, this could bar Random House from publishing Brown's book, which has sold more than 40 million copies, and even threaten the British release of the £53m film adaptation, starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Sir Ian McKellen.

However, lawyers representing Random House are expected to argue that the implications would damage the art of writing itself. It is believed they will tell the court that for centuries writers have recycled plots, themes and ideas from each other. One literary figure has pointed out that apart from A Midsummer Night's Dream, every one of Shakespeare's plays is based on another source. Such trading has given rise to the saying, 'good writers borrow, great writers steal'.

Brown, now a multi-millionaire who shuns the media spotlight, is expected to be in London to defend his work. A Random House source said: 'Can you copyright an idea? Previously copyright has applied just to how the idea is used. This is why we are confident. If the claimants win, it's the end of John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Robert Harris, Helen Fielding - and Shakespeare.' Random House is expected to point to a series of other books that have also 'borrowed' from Baigent and Leigh's work in the 24 years since it was published, none of which was sued. The implication is that Brown, like JK Rowling and others, has been targeted because of his multi-millionaire status. 'Where there's a hit, there's a writ,' the source said.

For book publishers, the most provocative question raised by the upcoming movie version of "The Da Vinci Code" is: Can a three-year-old best seller that has already been endlessly milked for profits yield one more windfall for the industry?

With the film opening in May, the publishing industry is placing one of its biggest bets ever on the staying power of a blockbuster book. Publishers are using the movie's release to anchor numerous "Da Vinci"-related titles and tie-ins, including the novel's first U.S. paperback run. And all of them are trying to harness the selling power of the most successful novel in recent memory, with an estimated 40 million copies in print world-wide.

The pile-on is a common model in the book world, but "Da Vinci" is having an unusually long run of tie-ins. "The publishing industry sees something that's working and keeps doing it until it keels over," says Robert Miller, president of Walt Disney's Hyperion book-publishing unit. "When angels were hot, the first 40 books about them succeeded. Then not. The first 20 O.J. Simpson books worked. Then not. The pie is so fixed and the crumbs so thin that when a new area opens, be it the men's movement or computer books, we jump on it."

These new titles range from updated guides to the Dan Brown thriller to new novels with similar "Da Vinci"-like themes. Earlier this month, Pearson's Dutton imprint published 45,000 copies of Raymond Khoury's debut novel "The Last Templar," a thriller with religious overtones. There are now more than 146,000 in print. Next month, Bertelsmann's Ballantine Books will release Steve Berry's "The Templar Legacy"; it is already racking up sizable preorders on Barnes & Noble's Web site. "This is a ripple effect from a cultural phenomenon, no more, no less," says Richard Sarnoff, executive vice president of Bertelsmann's Random House, whose Doubleday imprint originally published "The Da Vinci Code."

But is there still an audience for new Da Vinci books? After all, dozens of titles related to the novel, from Delacorte Press's "Da Vinci Decoded" (September 2004) to Berkley's "The Real History Behind the Da Vinci Code" (January 2005) already flooded the market after the book's initial release.

Ever since Sony announced the May 19 movie release of The Da Vinci Code last fall, and released the film's trailer in mid-December, the question in the book industry has been when the tie-in paperback would arrive. Newsweek's Jan. 2 cover story, touting Da Vinci as the year's "hottest movie," only upped the ante. Now, retailers say, Anchor Books has set a March 28 release date for the long-awaited mass-market edition.

Though Anchor is guarding the printing and other specifics as closely as clues to the Holy Grail, the figure is likely to outstrip those for each of the last three Harry Potter paperbacks, which had first printings of up to 2.5 million.

With hardcover sales of 12 million in North America in less than three years, Da Vinci will be back at #1 on PW’s hardcover fiction list next Monday after slipping as low as #13 on November 7 (and off the New York Times printed list on November 13). For Allison Elsby, category manager for genre fiction at Borders & Walden, that's the strongest sign that plenty of people still haven't read the book and that demand for the paperback will be strong.

*****

Unlike Anchor, Dan Brown's other publishers are a little more forthcoming about the details of their makeover plans for his backlist. Pocket will publish new premium mass market editions of both Angels and Demons and Deception Point, each with first printings of 1 million, that will retail for $9.99. St. Martin's will resolicit orders for Digital Fortress.

Stephen Lanzalotta created what he called the "Da Vinci Diet" in response to the decline in bread consumption brought on by the popularity of the Atkins Diet. The diet consists mostly of Mediterranean foods, including bread, fish, cheese, vegetables, meat, nuts and wine.

He signed a deal last year with Warner Books, a division of Time Warner Book Group, that included a six-figure advance. Warner announced this week that the book, The Diet Code: Revolutionary Weight-Loss Secrets From Da Vinci and The Golden Ratio, will be the first in its new line of books called Warner Wellness, which will focus on health, fitness, relationships and similar topics. The book is scheduled for release in April 2006.

The diet is based on the Golden Ratio or Phi, a mathematical value that was used to build the pyramids and has since been found to exist most everywhere in nature. Da Vinci is said to have used the Golden Ratio to proportion the human figures in his paintings — which is how it found its way into Dan Brown’s hugely popular novel.

"The basic premise is most universal patterns are based on the Golden Ratio, including our bodies," Lanzalotta said Thursday in his bakery-restaurant, Sophia’s. His biggest sellers are now combination plates — typically bread or polenta, cheese, olives and braised chard or Italian coleslaw — featuring the basic mix of his diet: 20 percent protein, 52 percent carbohydrates and 28 percent fat. Lanzalotta said his dietary regimen has helped him maintain a fit 160 pounds without giving up on the foods he loves.