A spectacular best seller and now a classic, The Name of the Rose catapulted Umberto Eco, an Italian professor of semiotics turned novelist, to international prominence. An erudite murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century monastery, it is not only a gripping story but also a brilliant exploration of medieval philosophy, history, theology, and logic.

Umberto Eco (born January 5th 1932) is an Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. His 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum has been described as a "thinking person's Da Vinci Code".Eco is President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.He has also written academic texts, children�s books and many essays. He was also voted 2nd in Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.He was voted 14th in 2008.