As a teenager, I enjoyed it, and I had fun with the tales about Prester John and all that stuff. It's too long ago to recall enough to really defend it properly, though, and I don't know what I'd think if I reread it now. But I definitely do recall finding it much easier to get through than Name of the Rose (with Foucault's Pendulum I personally didn't really have much of a problem in that sense, but they do go on and on about the damn Rosicrucians...).

Loana is a good choice to read in Italian, I'd say, because it's easily the most personal of his novels (that I've read, which is all of them except The Island of the Day Before) and hence the one most linked to Italy - as in, the Italy of Eco's youth in the 1940s, and its popular culture (which has a surprising amount of American comics in it).