If you have followed my writings, you would know my admiration for Umberto Eco, the late literary maestro from Italy. Every year I set aside one or two of his books – nonfiction or fiction – to read. It has become a kind of yearly ritual for me. Interestingly, it was only after I began reading Eco that I finally allowed myself to slip into fiction as a serious reader.
Every time I return to Umberto Eco, I feel excited like a little kid. After all, this was a man who could quote Thomas Aquinas, dismantle conspiracy theories, decode medieval manuscripts, tear apart Silvio Berlusconi and still crack a joke about Superman and James Bond. Casually.
On February 19, 2016, Eco passed away. Which means this month marks ten years since we lost one of the last true public intellectuals who could move effortlessly between academia and airport bookshops.
This blog post is a curious glimpse through Eco’s life, his books, his obsessions, his contradictions and the quiet lessons he left behind.
If you are a fan of Eco like me, this post will feel like a reunion. If you aren’t, consider this an invitation to discover him for the first time.
🎧 Prefer listening? You can hear my full podcast episode about Umberto Eco’s Legacy on Spotify
A Child Raised on Lies and Libraries
Eco was born in 1932, in Alessandria, Italy. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but Eco’s heart was set on medieval philosophy.
As a child, he grew up during Mussolini’ Italy. So Fascism was not a headline for him. It was in the air he breathed. Schoolbooks, slogans, ceremonies, newspapers, radio – all worked together to train his belief and obedience.
That experience shaped one of Eco’s lifelong intellectual fixations: how ordinary people fall for bad ideas.
Bad ideas here does not mean people are ignorant. Eco’s point was more uncomfortable. People fall for bad ideas because bad ideas:
- offer a clean story when reality is messy.
- make you feel part of a group.
- replace thinking with belonging and
- reward conformity socially.
When he was young, Eco won a school prize. The prize was a book. The title was something like The Young Fascist.
Eco later joked that this was his first encounter with propaganda. This childhood experience later showed up in all his works:
- In his famous essay often discussed as “Ur-Fascism” (1995), he tries to describe recurring traits of fascist thinking, as patterns, not as one-time history.
- In Foucault’s Pendulum (1998), he shows how conspiracy thinking is built, then spreads, then consumes the people who invented it.
- His debut novel The Name of the Rose (1980) is about fear of knowledge and institutions that control what people are allowed to think.
Umberto Eco learned early in life that books are not innocent. They persuade and take sides.
That idea never left him.
The Academic Who Refused to Stay Put
Eco was not just a celebrated author. He was, first and foremost, a serious academic.
He studied philosophy at the University of Turin, one of Italy’s most serious intellectual environments at the time. His doctoral thesis was on the aesthetic theories of Thomas Aquinas, a subject that already tells you something important about Eco.
He was not interested in philosophy as an abstract subject, but in philosophy as a system that shaped how people saw beauty, truth, and authority.
Not exactly beach reading.
As a professor at the University of Bologna, one of the oldest universities in the world, Eco became a rare figure. He was the university professor deeply embedded in serious research who also wrote with ease about comic strips, detective fiction and popular culture.
He wrote dense academic works, yes, but he never abandoned humor. His focal point was that intelligence should never sound like punishment.
The Accidental Novelist
Eco often said he became a novelist almost by accident. That line is usually misunderstood. What he meant was not that his first novel came casually to him, but that it arrived after decades of intellectual accumulation.
By the time he wrote The Name of the Rose – his debut novel, Eco was in in his late 40s. He had spent years immersed in medieval theology, semiotics, textual interpretation, and the politics of knowledge. The novel was not a departure from his academic life. It was its condensation.
Publishers were nervous for obvious reasons. The novel had untranslated Latin quotations and long theological arguments.
However, when the book hit the shelves, it caught everyone’s fancy. The dangerous idea that access to knowledge can destabilize entire systems of power came as a shock treatment to its readers.
Eco later remarked that if he had written the novel ten years earlier, it would have failed. Not because the book would have been weaker, but because the readers would have been.
Books as Dangerous Objects
A quick detour to my earlier point – Eco loved books, but he never romanticized them.
He warned that books can mislead. That libraries can hide poison. In Foucault’s Pendulum, he skewered conspiracy culture long before social media made it fashionable.
Three editors invent a fake conspiracy as an intellectual joke. The world takes it seriously and things spiral out of control.
Some readers believed the conspiracy was real and Eco found that terrifying and slightly funny. But Mostly terrifying.
The Private Man with Public Opinions
Eco was not a recluse. He gave interviews, he wrote columns and he spoke sharply about media, politics and technology.
Late in life, Eco became increasingly vocal about the modern media environment. When he warned about social media amplifying voices without filters or responsibility, many thought he was a grumpy old man – indulging in generational grumbling.
BUT he was extending a lifelong argument he had been making since his days in semiotics and television: that every medium reshapes authority.
His concern was never free speech. Eco believed speech was messy, argumentative, and essential. What disturbed him was unearned authority. In the age of algorithms, attention itself begins to masquerade as credibility.
Visibility can be confused with knowledge. Loudness with legitimacy. To Eco, this was not a technological problem, but a cultural one.
At home, this tension between knowledge and ignorance took a quieter, almost comic form. Eco lived among roughly 30,000 books, though some put the number closer to 50,000. The size of the library mattered less than how he spoke about it.
Visitors would curiously ask, “Have you read all these?” Eco would reply, “These are the ones I need to read.”
The Later Novels and the Long Goodbye
Eco continued writing fiction well into old age. Baudolino (2000) played with lies and history. The Prague Cemetery (2010) examined the anatomy of conspiracy and hatred. Numero Zero (2015) was his sharp farewell to journalism, fake news and moral cowardice.
Alongside these novels, Eco’s later years were also marked by a series of essay collections that felt like distilled conversations with the reader. In books like Turning Back the Clock, Inventing the Enemy, and How to Travel with a Salmon, Eco moved effortlessly between politics, media, memory, language, and everyday absurdities.
Eco knew exactly what world he was leaving behind. He wasn’t optimistic. But he was precise.
Why Eco Still Matters
In his final years, Eco slowed down physically but never intellectually. He continued to write, to give interviews, to irritate and provoke in equal measure.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died on February 19, 2016, in Milan, at the age of 84. The end was private and unsentimental, much like the man himself.
Eco didn’t want praise. He wanted alert readers. He believed reading was not a leisure activity but a form of mental training. A good book, he would often say, should make the reader work, doubt themselves, slow down, and occasionally feel uncomfortable.
That, in my view, is the most an intellectual can give. Not answers, but the burden of thinking.
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