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In the letter to the reader which constitutes the first page of this book, and is also included on this webpage for the novel, at present, Eco writes that he expects the reader to be one of two sorts: 1.) The moronic Dan Brown conspiracy fanatic. or 2.) The reader who knows his/her history, is aware that events recounted in this book actually transpired and is fully cognizant - made even more piquantly so by this novel - that "these things could happen again today." I really don't think Eco has to fret himself overmuch about the Dan Brown type. This type of reader seems more than a bit of a fictitious foil that Eco has set up. Perhaps things are different in Italy or on the Continent, but in the Anglophone world the overlap between Brown readers and Eco readers is so small as to be microscopic. It seems to me that the second type of reader at whom Eco claims, at least, that he is directing this historically-based narrative will not find "his brow beaded with sweat" or be terribly horrified by the character Simonini, whom Eco ever so modestly dubs "the most cynical and disagreeable in all the history of literature." He or she will rather be bored senseless by the countless, repetitive acts of cruelty, cynicism and majestic feats of gastronomy. There is a third type of reader whom Eco doesn't bother to mention, a reader interested in the reliability of the narration and the narrators. We have the split personalities of Simonini - assuming they really are split. Remember, we have a mysterious editor here who fills in the gaps when neither Simonini's account nor that of his alter ego the abbé will quite do. Who's to say how much the reader can rely upon HIM? I turn the reader's or prospective reader's attention to the last sentence of the first paragraph of Chapter 16, written by our mysterious editor: "To be frank, if it were not for the fact that these pages refer to events that actually took place, such alterations between amnesic euphoria and dysphoric might seem like a device of the Narrator." Ahem, indeed they might. Actually, the entire book is what I would call an exercise in meta-historical fiction by our author, the renowned professor of Semiotics, and a very tiresome one at that. It's not a question of whether the book is historically accurate. It is. It's a question of Eco playing narrator-identity games with us and whether we enjoy them. It's a question of whether you fancy your Professor winking at you.