Saint Baudolino - Remains and Legend

Remains and Legend

Four centuries later, in 1168, Alessandria was founded as a bastion of the Lombard League against the Holy Roman Empire. The citizens of Forum were transferred to the new city, bringing with them the remains of the saint. In 1174, according to tradition, he appeared on the bastions of the city and put to flight the Imperial troops who were besieging the city. In 1189 a church was built in his honour under the rule of the Humiliati. These monks, and the Dominicans who succeeded them on the suppression of order of the Humiliati in 1571, elaborated the scanty accounts of Baudolino’s life and promulgated such anachronistic beliefs as that he had belonged to the order of the Humiliati and that he had been an archbishop of Alessandria.

In 1786 Saint Baudolino was proclaimed the principal patron of the city and diocese of Alessandria.

With the closure of the church in 1803, Baudolino's remains were transferred to the church of Sant'Alessandro and then in 1810 to a chapel dedicated to him in the new cathedral.

In 2000 Umberto Eco, a native of Alessandria, published his novel Baudolino, whose eponymous twelfth-century hero meets the saint as a boy on a number of occasions "in the Frescheta woods there specially when theres real fog when you cant see the tip of your nose." Forty years later, during his career as a stylite near Byzantium, Eco has his hero perform a miracle of clairvoyance modelled closely on that of the saint.