Foucault's Pendulum

A student of philosophy in 1970s Milan, Casaubon is completing a thesis on the Templars, a monastic knighthood disbanded in the 1300s for questionable practices. At Pilades Bar, he meets up with Jacopo Belbo, an editor of obscure texts at Garamond Press. Together, with Belbo's colleague Distallevi, they scrutinize the fantastic theories of a prospective author, Colonel Ardenti, who claims that for seven centuries the Templars have been carrying out a complex scheme of revenge. When Ardenti disappears mysteriously, the three begin using their detailed knowledge of the occult sciences to construct a Plan for the Templars - only to discover too late that the Plan they have invented is in fact real. As brilliant and quirky as his Name of the rose, this book (not a novel in the strict sense of the word) is full of puns, allusions and literary references and "information" playfully and masterly manipulated by Eco