Il nome della rosa

Northern Italy, 1327. The Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, a man of formidable logic and wide learning, arrives at a wealthy Benedictine abbey with his young novice Adso to attend a theological disputation between representatives of the Pope and the Franciscan order. Instead he is asked to investigate the suspicious death of a monk — the first in a string of killings that will claim several more lives before the week is out.

As William applies deduction worthy of his namesake to the abbey's secrets, the investigation leads into the abbey's vast, labyrinthine library, guarded against unauthorized readers, and to a mysterious book rumored to contain Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy. Around the murders swirl the era's great intellectual battles: the poverty of Christ, the nature of heresy and the Inquisition, and the tension between reason and dogma.

Umberto Eco's 1980 novel is at once a rigorously plotted murder mystery, a work of dense historical and semiotic erudition, and a meditation on the danger of any institution — religious or otherwise — that fears laughter and forbids inquiry. This German edition is translated by Burkhart Kroeber, Eco's long-standing German translator.