Is the name of the Rose a true story?
The name of the rose is one of Umberto Eco's most famous novels which inspired highly successful films and fiction. Today, Monday 23 December 2024, in prime time on Raitre, Jean-Jacques Annaud's film is broadcast with a magnificent Sean Connery in the role of a monk who, together with another monk, manages to solve mysterious crimes that occurred in a majestic and solitary abbey. Extremely famous throughout the world, The Name of the Rose is considered one of the best novels ever written. The plot, in fact, fascinates from the first pages, but is it inspired by a true story?
Within the novel, Umberto Eco inserts, alongside the invented characters, also real-life characters such as Emperor Ludovico the Bavarian or Fra Dolcino. Umberto Eco reconstructs the Italian Middle Ages and the clashes between the papacy and the Empire.
The Name of the Rose: Umberto Eco's prologue reveals the origin of the novel
The name of the rose, therefore, it would seem like a perfect mix of reality and fantasy. In fact, everything starts from the discovery of a medieval manuscript that Umberto Eco undertook to translate. Umberto Eco himself revealed the origins of Romand in the prologue.
As we read on Wikipedia, in fact, in the prologue of “The Name of the Rose”, “the author says he read the manuscript during a stay abroad of a Benedictine monk concerning a mysterious event that took place in the Middle Ages in an abbey in the Piedmont Alps. Enraptured by the reading, he then began to translate it in some notebooks before breaking off relations with the person who had put the manuscript in his hands. After having reconstructed the bibliographic research which led him to recover some confirmations, as well as the missing parts of the text, the author then goes on to narrate the story of Adso da Melk“, we read on Wikipedia.
