Baudolino

As in «The Name of the Rose», the Middle Ages and modernity here resonate and reflect each other. Like «The Name of the Rose», «Baudolino» is a historical novel with elements of a detective story. The plot here goes back to «The Six Napoleons» by Conan Doyle, adding mythical stories of the Magi kings, the Shroud of Turin, the search for the Grail, where heroes wander through fictional kingdoms and battle armies of fantastic beings, culminating in a thriller-like double twist. Journalists wrote immediately: Baudolino is an self-portrait of Eco. An inexhaustible storyteller, scholar, celebrity, and citizen of the world, and at the same time an expert, and at times a participant in the simple, carnivorous, semi-peasant life of the Italian province, Eco and his hero are flesh of the flesh of their native town Alexandria in Piedmont. It is this Alexandria, a city born before the reader's eyes, that in Eco's novel is depicted, with all its raw simplicity, as almost a sacred place, the vale of earthly paradise, the refuge of the Grail.