Umberto Eco: Baudolino
In April 1204, Constantinople, the famous capital of Byzantium, was sacked by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. In the midst of carnage and general chaos, a man named Baudolino saves a historian and court dignitary from certain death and begins to tell a very unusual story about his life and fantastic adventures.
On the border between credible history and complete phantasmagoria, Baudolino's adventures take place. On the pages of this novel, like some grotesque and colorful medieval illuminations, the characters of saints, hermits, drunkards, eunuchs, warriors, emperors, unicorns, virtuous ladies, as well as the mysterious Pope John and his fantastic kingdom are hidden...
The Middle Ages, far from the modern perceived period as the "dark age", in this work by Eko, shows itself as a luxurious epoch in which the fantastic and continuously real interweaving, and where man could still be deeply taken aback and surprised by the secrets of his own world. It was a period in which some special people, as fearless pioneers and explorers, went on daring journeys to territories that hide numerous dangers and secrets, to places that are not yet on world maps. The Middle Ages, in Eco's prose, thus become an enigma, an unexplored universe with stars, a galaxy of unknown worlds that offer numerous surprises.
