The Libraries

The Rare Book Library consists of around 1,300 volumes, including 36 incunabula. The collection is known as the Bibliotheca semiologica curiosa lunatica magica et pneumatica — a name Umberto Eco himself coined to evoke a library devoted to “occult knowledge and false learning.”

Today, the Rare Book Library is housed at the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan. It was originally located in what Eco called the Stanza degli antichi — a true refuge overlooking the Castello Sforzesco, without a telephone or computer, filled instead with sheet music and flutes that Eco played almost every day. On its shelves, the books stood alongside genuine mirabilia — dog testicles, seashells, coral branches, wooden models — forming a kind of Renaissance Wunderkammer.

The 1,328 volumes arrived at the Braidense in August 2021 and, since 2022, have been housed in the “Studiolo Umberto Eco,” next to the Sala Manzoniana. The collection has been fully catalogued, included in the library’s OPAC, and is now searchable through the National Library Service catalogue (Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale).

The library took shape mainly after the success of The Name of the Rose (1980), which allowed Eco to indulge his passion for rare and precious books. Over time, it became a crucial resource for the writing of his later works.

Among its treasures are titles essential to a refined bibliophile such as Eco: the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and De Civitate Dei (1470), along with volumes of great fascination such as the Malleus maleficarum (1492). The collection also includes the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus, Giordano Bruno’s De umbris idearum (1582), and works by early Rosicrucians, the alchemist Michael Maier, the natural philosopher Robert Fludd, and the learned Athanasius Kircher.

Most of the volumes in the Library are marked by a distinctive ex libris chosen and used by Umberto Eco himself. The design reproduces a woodcut originally included in the alchemical work Della tramutatione metallica sogni tre by Giovanni Battista Nazari (1572). The image depicts a donkey seated upon what the text calls a “round stone,” though in the engraving it takes the shape of a latrine topped by a cornucopia and fitted with a drain. The animal plays a small pipe, setting in motion a merry dance of a dozen cavorting monkeys.

The Library of Modern Books consists of around 44,000 volumes. This was Umberto Eco’s working library, originally distributed across several locations: the various areas of his Milan home and studio (over 33,000 volumes) and the family house in Monte Cerignone (over 11,000 volumes).

Today, the books are located in Milan, in the apartment designed more than thirty years ago specifically to house them — a large, ring-shaped home whose corridors, with reinforced floors, were lined with custom-built shelves.

Following the path traced by the towering shelves — Italian and foreign literature, poetry, popular and genre fiction, feuilletons, comics, literary history and criticism, journalism, communication and mass media, art and iconology — one reaches Eco’s large study. There, comb-shaped and island-style bookcases hold volumes on philosophy, science, history, philology, mnemotechnics, puzzles and riddles, publishing, linguistics, and semiotics, as well as books by and about Eco himself.

Starting in 2026, the collection will find its permanent home at the University of Bologna, in spaces specially designed within the University Library of Bologna to recreate the atmosphere of the home and studio where the intellectual worked.

The Fondazione Umberto Eco is dedicated to preserving and enhancing this unique bibliographic heritage. Through projects of cataloguing, digitization, and research, the Foundation works to make these extraordinary collections accessible to both the public and scholars.

Its mission goes beyond the physical preservation of the volumes: it seeks to understand and convey their cultural and intellectual significance. Each book, each note, each arrangement on the shelves tells a story about Umberto Eco’s thought and his working method.

The Foundation organizes events, exhibitions, and conferences to share the value of these author’s libraries with a wider audience, while also promoting academic research on these bibliographic collections of exceptional importance.

The inventories and photographic surveys produced by Eco’s heirs are essential tools: beyond providing access to the collections in their original form and arrangement, they document the complexity of these author’s libraries — an open work whose value lies not only in the sum of its titles but also in their placement, thematic resonances, and affinities.

The photographic records make visible what Aby Warburg called the “law of the good neighbor”: they unfold the organic bond between one volume and another, between one theme and the next — a relationship of proximity that, if severed, would result in a loss of information and a depletion of the relational and curatorial richness of the collections.

These intricate book collections are both the product and the testimony of Umberto Eco’s intellectual activity, his scholarly path, and the network of relations at whose center he stood. Gathered over the course of a lifetime, the volumes that make up Umberto Eco’s libraries mirror his intellectual journey and represent its scientific continuation.

Eco personally oversaw their design and arrangement, establishing thematic relationships and reading pathways in harmony with his studies, research interests, and cultural engagement.

Adding to their value is the presence, within the volumes, of dedications, handwritten annotations, notes of ownership and reading, ex libris, and inserts such as letters, business cards, photographs, clippings, articles, reviews, theses, preprints, or even printed texts that became the ground for corrections, updates, elaborations, and handwritten rewritings for later editions.

Each book, each archival document has taken on the status of a personal artifact — a witness to the one who gathered and included it, with its specific features, into his collection as part of his intellectual and cultural practice.