'' were said by someone capable of saying it, because in his day it was still possible? A mask - that was what I needed. Is it possible to say, ''It was a beautiful morning at the end of November,'' without feeling like Snoopy? But what if I had Snoopy say it? If, that is, ''It was a beautiful morning. I was a novice narrator, and in the past I had looked at narrators from the opposite side of the barricade. The Middle Ages, and through the mouth of a chronicler of the period. I know the present only through the television screen, whereas I have a direct knowledge of the Middle Ages. At a certain point I said to myself that, since the Middle Ages were my day-to day fantasy, I might as well write a novel actually set in that period. I dug out a huge amount of material (file cards, photocopies, notebooks), accumulated since 1952 and originally intended for other, still-vague purposes - a history of monsters, or an analysis of medieval encyclopedias or a theory of lists. After all, I was a medievalist in hibernation. But in any convent or abbey, countless medieval memories survive, so I began rummaging among my files. I promptly tore up his letter of reply, in which he said he knew of no poison that would serve my purpose it was a document that, read in another context, could lead to the gallows.Īt first my monks were going to live in a contemporary convent (I had in mind an investigator-monk who read the left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto - in Italy even the left has its own heretics). Since none of the poisons satisfied me, I asked a biologist friend to suggest a drug that possessed certain properties (the possibility of being absorbed by the skin when handled). ning I read Mathieu Orfila's ''Traite des poisons,'' which I had bought 20 years before at a bookstall by the Seine. He is a visiting professor at Columbia University this fall. Umberto Eco teaches semiotics at the University of Bologna. Afterward, I found a notebook dated 1975 in which I had written down a list of monks in an unspecified monastery. The idea must have originated even earlier. I believe a novel is alwaysīorn of an idea like this the rest is flesh that is added along the way.

March of 1978, prodded by a seminal idea: I felt IBEGAN writing ''The Name of the Rose'' in

In the name of the rose book