Umberto Eco

Born on January 5, 1932, in Alessandria, a provincial town in Piedmont, Italy, Umberto Eco was the son of an accountant and grew up under Fascism, an experience that informed his lifelong preoccupation with the mechanisms of ideology and belief. He studied medieval philosophy and literature at the University of Turin, writing his thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, and received his laurea in 1954. He worked for the Italian state television network RAI before joining the University of Bologna, where he taught semiotics for decades and became one of the most celebrated intellectuals in Europe. His scholarly works , A Theory of Semiotics (1976), The Role of the Reader (1979), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984) , established him as a leading figure in the study of signs and meaning. Then, at the age of forty-eight, he published his first novel: The Name of the Rose (1980), a labyrinthine murder mystery set in a fourteenth-century Benedictine abbey, which became an international bestseller, selling over fifty million copies and proving that a novel saturated with medieval theology, Aristotelian philosophy, and semiotic theory could also be a page-turning thriller. Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) explored conspiracy theories and occult history with similar erudition. He continued publishing novels , The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), The Prague Cemetery (2010), Numero Zero (2015) , while maintaining his prolific output of essays, columns, and scholarly works. His 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” remains widely read as a taxonomy of authoritarian ideologies. He died on February 19, 2016, in Milan, at his home, at the age of eighty-four.

Visitors to Eco's Milan apartment walked corridors of bookcases holding thirty thousand volumes, with twenty thousand more near Urbino. Nearly everyone asked the same question: had he read them all? To the ones who did, he gave a deadpan reply, that these were merely the ones he still had to finish by month's end.