Umberto Eco

A revered Italian author, academic, philosopher and critic, Umberto Eco was a true polymath with wide-ranging interests across fields of literature, semiotics, popular culture and gastronomy. A distinctive and eccentric figure who achieved cult status after the publication of his bestseller The Name of the Rose, Eco’s students would – as the Guardian wrote in Eco’s obituary – become used to seeing their professor ‘shuffling grumpily round his office… wearing a tweed deerstalker and a large digital wristwatch-cum-calculator.’

Born in Alessandria, a small city in Piedmont, Eco studied medieval philosophy and literature in Turin before publishing an academic work on Thomas Aquinas and then working as a journalist and editor at the Italian publishing house Bompiani in Milan, where he met some of Italy’s most daring and pioneering artists and writers. From 1966 he was appointed as a professor of semiotics, first at Milan and then in Bologna. His lifelong fascination with signs and symbols – from the mundane to the sacred – was an essential influence on his seminal medieval whodunit, The Name of the Rose. Set in a 14^th-century monastery the novel became a phenomenal worldwide bestseller and has been adapted for the screen, first in 1986 as a feature film and a 2019 Italian-German mini-series, aired on the BBC.

Eco continued to tread a delicate tightrope between academic rigour and popular appeal throughout his life, blending medieval history and scholarship with elements of popular thrillers in regular columns, essays and his novels Foucault’s Pendulum, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero.