Preface: Discovery of the Manuscript

The narrator, a modern scholar, recounts finding a book by Abbé Vallet in Prague in 1968, which claims to reproduce a fourteenth-century manuscript by Adso of Melk. After losing the book, he searches for its source but finds only contradictions. Later, in Buenos Aires in 1970, he encounters quotations from Adso's manuscript in a work by Milo Temesvar, confirming its existence. He decides to publish his Italian translation of the story, acknowledging its uncertain origins and his own doubts about its authenticity.