Umberto Eco, born in January 5, 1932, Alessandria, Italy—died February 19, 2016, Milan. He was an Italian literary critic, novelist, and semiotician. He is best known for his novel Il nome della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose).
His exemplary writings in Italian are on
criticism, history, and communication have been translated, including La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (1993; The Search for the Perfect Language) and Kant e l’ornitorinco (1997; Kant and the Platypus). He edited the illustrated companion volumes Storia della bellezza (2004; History of Beauty) and Storia della bruttezza (2007; On Ugliness), and he wrote another pictorial book, Vertigine della lista (2009; The Infinity of Lists), produced in conjunction with an exhibition he organized at the Louvre Museum, in which he investigated the Western passion for list making and accumulation. Costruire il nemico e altri scritti occasionali (2011; Inventing the Enemy, and Other Occasional Writings) collected pieces—some initially presented as lectures—on a wide range of subjects, from fascist reactions to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to the implications of WikiLeaks. Storia delle terre e dei luoghi leggendari (2013; The Book of Legendary Lands) investigates a variety of mythological and apocryphal settings.
The Name of the Rose—in story, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century Italian monastery but, in essence, a questioning of “truth” from theological, philosophical, scholarly, and historical perspectives—became an international best seller. A film version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, appeared in 1986. Eco continued to explore the connections between fantasy and reality in another best-selling novel, Il pendolo di Foucault (1988; Foucault’s Pendulum).