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Italian writer and man of letters, Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932, in Alessandria (Piedmont) and died on February 19, 2016. Little is known about his origins and childhood, except that he showed extreme precocity by obtaining his doctorate from the University of Turin at only twenty-two years of age, in 1954, presenting a thesis dedicated to the philosophical thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, "The Aesthetic Problem in Saint Thomas Aquinas".
Between 1954 and 1959 he worked as a cultural editor at the famous Italian state television network RAI, also teaching during that time at the universities of Turin, Milan and Florence and at the Polytechnic Institute of Milan. At only thirty-nine years of age he was appointed full professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, the most prestigious in his country.
He began writing in the late 1950s, contributing to various periodicals with a series of articles that would be collected in volumes such as "Diario Minimo" (1963, Minimal Diary), "Il Costume di Casa" (1973), "Dalla Periferia Dell'Impero" (1977) and "Il Secondo Diario Minimo" (1992). His early career was also marked by works such as "Opera Aperta" (1962) and "Apocalittici E Integrati" (1964, Apocalyptic and Integrated).
Maintaining a quite complete and active publishing career, Eco continued to publish academic studies on Aesthetics, Semiotics, and Philosophy, among which we can highlight "La Definizione Dell'Arte" (1968), "Le Forme Del Contenuto" (1971), "Trattato Di Semiotica Generale" (1976), "Come Si Fa Una Tesi Di Laurea" (How to Write a Doctoral Thesis, 1977), and "Arte E Bellezza Nell'Estetica Medievale" (1986), a work that earned him several renowned literary awards. In 1980, he published his first novel, "Il Nome Della Rosa" (The Name of the Rose), a work that was immediately considered a classic of world literature. Telling the story of a 14th-century monk who is summoned to a Benedictine abbey to solve a crime, Eco re-established the old conflict between the material and the spiritual world. The book was successfully adapted for film in 1986 by director Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Quite popular, especially in more erudite circles, was his second novel, "Il Pendolo Di Foucault" (1988, Foucault's Pendulum), in which Eco contrasted hermeticism and cosmology with the potential of information technology and the dangers of organized crime.
The public received with more modesty "L'Isola Del Giorno Prima" (1995, The Island of the Day Before), a novel in which Roberto della Griva, a 17th-century aristocrat, awakens on a ship adrift in the South Pacific, and "Baudolino" (2000, Baudolino), a work also belonging to the historical novel genre.