the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and the knowable, of writing driven on by a thirst for knowledge that may in turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopaedic. He is the patron saint of the nearby city of Alessandria, where his feast is celebrated on the Sunday following 10 November.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.It is fiction - Eco's, Baudolino's, tall-storytellers' of the ancient world - woven into the history of the fourth crusade. His story begins in 1155, when Baudolino – a highly talented Italian peasant boy – is sold to and adopted by the emperor Frederick I.

Discover the Middle Ages with Baudolino - a wondrous, dazzling, beguiling tale of history, myth and invention. The commander - who proves to be the emperor Frederick Barbarossa - adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends. This is Eco's field and the debates are both detailed, obscurantist, comic and brilliantly baffling. Despite being a slab of a novel it never becomes a slog nor outstays its welcome, leaving you with a nice double plot twist and possibly the best ending line ever written as parting gifts.Even when he is sent to Paris to be schooled (and to avoid his growing attraction to Frederick’s new wife, the young Empress Beatrice), his habit of generating false realities continues. He's often torn between the loyalty to his emperor and to his friends, his love, his parents, forced to ponder the consequences of his actions. He talks a kind of rushed slapstick - he sounds like a popular historical romance of, perhaps, the 1950s - and his author's control of the pace and tension of his narrative is much less secure than it was in The Name of the Rose. The family romance extends itself into the romance of travel, the romance of legend, and the romance of desire. When Liutprand is hunting in the forest near Forum, and his nephew Aufusus is accidentally injured by an arrow, the king sends to Baodolinus asking him to pray for the life of the boy.