Breakfast at Hotel Burg Schwartzenstein is served in their main restaurant area. There are numerous rooms with beautiful views looking over vineyards and towards the Rhine River.

I had a bowl of granola before being talked into a hot breakfast item. I fear stepping on the scale when I get home.

The grounds of the hotel are pleasant with a surprising amount of bamboo and even a gecko sunning itself on the steps.

We took a taxi to Kloster Eberbach which is about 12 kilometres away by road; less as the crow flies. The drive reminded us why we don’t drive in Europe as we went down some roads that I would have thought were too small for the taxi vehicle.

The Kloster is a former Cistercian abbey with a basilica, rooms where monks and lay members slept and ate. One of the main activities was and continues to be wine making.

For lunch, we had one of the Kloster wines.

We had hoped to join a Name of the Rose tour but discovered it was only in German. Instead we got audio guides to tour ourselves around in English.

View from inside the tower

The basilica is Romanesque; very impressive in its size.

The 1986 movie The Name of the Rose was set in the 14th century. William of Baskerville (Sean Connery), a renowned Franciscan monk, and his apprentice, Adso of Melk (Christian Slater), travel to an abbey where a suspicious death has occurred. Using his deductive powers, William begins investigating what he believes to be murder. During the course of his investigation, several more monks wind up dead. With fear running through the abbey, the church leaders call forth Bernardo Gui (F. Murray Abraham), William’s nemesis, to find the truth.

The story is based on the novel by Umberto Eco. There’s also a tv series with John Turturro, which I will have to watch later. But it was not filmed at Kloster Eberbach.

The monks’ dormitory was used for a number of scenes in The Name of the Rose movie.

This small cell was used as Sean Connery’s character’s bedroom.

We watched a short film about the production of the movie at the abbey.

Grape presses for wine are in a room used in the movie.

There’s also an abbey museum.

We never toured around the gardens which, we saw, also had animals. There were goats and what looked like llamas, but that doesn’t seem to fit with the medieval abbey environment so I wonder if they were some other animal. We never investigated.

Dinner was back at the hotel.