We combed through the folds of Umberto Eco's magnificent career — especially interviews given to foreign newspapers — in search of his most original and unconventional views. Thirty-eight honorary degrees, books translated into 49 languages. But beyond the successes everyone knows, there's more.
Umberto Eco's books, qualifications and awards are well known. Philosopher, writer, essayist, researcher, university professor, linguist and semiotician. Expert in communication, linguistics, semiotics and aesthetics. A graduate in philosophy, he held thirty-eight honorary degrees. Member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Académie Universelle des Cultures in Paris, the Academy of Russian Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
From 1961 to 2007, Eco was a university professor at various Italian, French and American universities. From 1989 he was president of the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies, and from 1994 honorary president of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. From 1999 he was also president of the Scuola superiore di Studi Umanistici at the University of Bologna.
Winner of the Premio Strega and the Prix Médicis for The Name of the Rose and the Premio Bancarella for Foucault's Pendulum. Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, Gold Medal for services to culture, Gold Cross of the Dodecanese and of the arts, and Officer of the Légion d'honneur. Columnist for newspapers, magazines and encyclopaedias, for the Corriere della Sera, L'Espresso (to whose founding he contributed) and Wikipedia, literary critic and co-editorial director at Bompiani for sixteen years (from 1959 to 1975).
He collaborated with Unesco, with the Triennale di Milano, with Expo 1967–Montreal, with the Fondation Européenne de la Culture and with many other organisations.
Against the backdrop of such a rich and magnificent career, we have singled out a few of his less well-known positions — always thought-provoking and brimming with intellectual stimulus.
Umberto Eco became an atheist by studying the works of a 13th-century saint, Saint Thomas Aquinas. He wrote his degree thesis on Aquinas's aesthetics, later expanded and revised in his essay Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (1956), the first of a long series of books on medieval culture, and indeed his very first book of all. In short, he moved from active membership of Catholic Action to atheism "thanks" to Saint Thomas. "One might say he miraculously cured me of my faith," Eco joked during a 2005 interview with Time.
From 1954 and for five years he worked at Rai as an official, tasked with modernising the state broadcaster, which was still too closely tied to the Eiar. It was perhaps during this period that his interest in mass media took root, an interest he later explored in several articles subsequently collected in two volumes, Diario minimo and Apocalittici e integrati. At the time, he noted that television's educational effort was hampered by the interests of its various executives: "There are sectors in which a certain cultural policy does not conflict with the needs of those who control the medium. That is why in Italy we have witnessed the praiseworthy popularisation of theatrical classics and opera, and a raising of the standard of light music, while scant attempts are made to improve the public's historical and social knowledge or to encourage a disposition towards free discussion."
The Name of the Rose was published by Bompiani in September 1980, has sold over 30 million copies worldwide — 7 million of them in Italy — and has been translated in 49 countries. Six years later it became a film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, with a cast including Sean Connery, Christian Slater, F. Murray Abrahams and Ron Perlman; it grossed around 80 million dollars worldwide and won a great many awards, among them four David di Donatello, three Nastri d'argento, two Baftas and a César. Annaud's film was not a faithful tracing of the book but a "consensual betrayal" of it, and Eco himself, the director recounted, had urged him throughout the making of the film to betray "the book well, because to adapt well you have to betray well."
In the essay "The Myth of Superman" (Role of the Reader, 1979), Umberto Eco explores the character's traits in the context of American society, defining him as a guardian of the law, bent on maintaining the status quo rather than improving social conditions.
Umberto Eco was always capable of catching people off guard — to the point of being almost playful. In his view, the world was saved by beans, which together with lentils and peas gave the impoverished masses of the Middle Ages a means of surviving winters of famine and of obtaining precious protein to withstand the diseases and malnutrition of those centuries. "Everyone would say the greatest invention of the millennium is television or the microchip," he told Bloomberg, "because we believe that the changes in our lives depend