Umberto Eco, 1932-2016
"To survive, you must tell stories."
Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before
Novelist, philosopher Umberto Eco, one of Italy's most important intellectuals, died on February 19, 2016. He was 84.
He was born in 1932 in Alessandria, Italy where as a teenager he wrote comic books and fantasy stories. He received a philosophy degree in 1954 from the University of Turin where he discovered his passion for the Middle Ages and semiotics — the use of signs and symbols to understand a culture. He became the first semiotics professor at the University of Bologna in 1971. He worked as a television journalist in the 1950s and wrote columns in Italian newspapers throughout his life.
Although Eco wrote scholarly works on a broad range of topics, he also wrote several children's books. He may be best known in North America for his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, partly written while Eco was teaching seminars at the University of Toronto. A frequent user of the school's Robarts Library, Eco modelled the staircases in his novel after the ones in the building.
His most recent novel is Numero Zero, a satire released in 2015 about the difficult and sometimes fraught relationship between the news media and the government.
(Photograph by Università Reggio Calabria [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons)
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He was at the library a few years ago for a very entertaining talk with the CBC’s Michael Enright. Here’s the link to Part 1 of that conversation on TPL’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY5vY1uWdtI