Eco Library opens in Bologna

The “Eco Library” opens its doors ten years after the death of the semiotician and University of Bologna professor, and just a few weeks after the major international conference dedicated to him by the University, which brought together hundreds of scholars and experts from around the world.

The “Eco Library” currently holds over 32,000 volumes from Eco’s home and study in Milan. The collection will be completed in the same location with the arrival of the books from his country house in Monte Cerignone, in the Marche region. It is one of the most significant contemporary author libraries, offering a unique insight into Eco’s working method, his sources, his cultural interests and the intellectual relationships that shaped his work.

Bologna and its University played a fundamental role in Umberto Eco’s academic career. Here, he trained generations of scholars and helped establish the University of Bologna as one of the world’s leading centres for research in semiotics and communication studies.

Thanks to the donation made by his heirs, the library brings to the University community and the city a collection that served as a working tool, a laboratory of ideas and a space for dialogue with world culture. The location of the collection in Bologna is therefore not only a tribute to Umberto Eco, but also a recognition of the deep and lasting bond that connected him to the University and to Bologna’s cultural context.

Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna from 1971 to 2007, Umberto Eco built up, over the course of his life, a collection that reflects the extraordinary breadth of his interests: from medieval philosophy to semiotics, from literature to linguistics, from popular culture to comics, from artistic avant-gardes to mass communication.

Housed in the twentieth-century wing of Palazzo Poggi, with access from Piazza Puntoni 2, the “Eco Library” preserves much of the original conceptual structure of the collection, despite the change of location. It is organised into thematic rooms that allow visitors to explore the main areas of Eco’s thought.

The transfer of the library from Milan to Bologna was made possible by the collaboration of Eco’s heirs and the Umberto Eco Foundation. Before the move, the original collection was studied, analysed and documented in detail in Eco’s Milan home, with the aim of preserving the organisation he had designed. The library was examined and mapped shelf by shelf, recording the position of the volumes, the thematic sequences and the juxtapositions between authors and disciplines. This made it possible to preserve, in the new Bologna location, the principles of organisation that had shaped the original library. These include the principle of the “good neighbour”, theorised by Aby Warburg and embraced by Eco himself, as well as the interdisciplinary connections, cross-references between texts and thematic affinities that were an integral part of Eco’s working method.

The spaces are organised into thematic rooms that reflect the layout of the original library and evoke the main areas of Eco’s thought. Particularly significant are the sections dedicated to literary genres, comics and popular culture, works by and about Umberto Eco, ancient and medieval philosophy, the history of ideas, semiotics, translation and theories of language. The structure of the library thus reproduces an extraordinary map of humanistic knowledge, allowing readers to follow their own interests along non-linear paths that may lead to unexpected discoveries.

This map is particularly well represented in the literature room, where Italian, French, English-language, German, Central European, Slavic, Latin American and many other literatures are arranged along timelines that can be read both horizontally, in a diachronic sense, for example English literature from the Arthurian cycle to T.S.  Eliot, or French literature from the Breton cycle to the Symbolists and Surrealists, and vertically, in a synchronic sense, in order to understand, for example, which works and authors belonged to the same historical period in Italy, England, Germany, France and elsewhere. From the nineteenth century onwards, the timelines develop in different directions and intersect with genres such as detective fiction and science fiction, popular literature and the feuilleton.

Among the shelves, visitors can find over 2,000 works written or edited by Eco in various editions and translations, in dozens of languages and from many countries, as well as around 600 books about Eco, including bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral theses. His comic book collection is also of great importance, above all the complete collection of Linus, the magazine co-founded by Eco in 1965.

The library also includes editions of his novels with working copies and autograph corrections, including the fourth Italian edition of The Name of the Rose, as well as entire shelves dedicated to some of his best-loved authors, such as Joyce, Nerval and Borges.

Finally, there is a large section on Kabbalah, magic, alchemy, occultism and conspiracy theories, themes to which Eco returned repeatedly both in his essays and in his novels, such as Foucault’s Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery.

With the opening of the Eco Library, a collection originally assembled for a scholar’s personal use becomes shared cultural heritage, available to the scientific community and the wider public.

The Library will be accessible for consultation and/or guided tours by booking in advance at: bibliotecaeco@unibo.it.