The World's Echo

The World's Echo is the page that collects traces, research, and initiatives on Umberto Eco from around the world.

A welcoming harbor for all those who, from New York to Chongqing in China, from Paris to South Africa, from Turin to Bologna and across the Americas, continue to make Umberto Eco’s voice resound. Born in Alessandria, trained as a philosopher in Turin, and shaped by the cultural atmosphere of 1960s Milan, Eco was the most cosmopolitan of Italian intellectuals. Always joyfully in flight between the peripheries and the empires of knowledge, he took us on journeys through the South Seas, sent dispatches from Prague in 1968, and told of Brazilian myths as vividly as of the legends born in the bars of the Po Valley. Between the four corners of the earth and the worlds of the imagination, he made us believe in phantom islands and an Irish monks’ whales, and wrapped us in endless lists of words and things. His work travels across languages — from Georgian to Armenian, from Icelandic to Malayalam, from Persian to Thai, all the way to Vietnamese, where generations of students have learned how to write theses and bibliographies thanks to the famous “index cards” of How to Write a Thesis.

Here, curious readers and travelers will find news, research centers, prestigious cultural institutions, conferences, honorary degrees, awards and recognitions, scattered memories — because Eco’s work is an infinite map that always leads from the margins back to a center, which in turn points outward, toward the elsewhere of imagination. Valentino Bompiani, who knew much about people and their works, once wrote of Eco: “A philosopher, he swam in his own element, yet his curiosity and commitment were boundless — from St. Thomas to poems ‘composed’ by a computer, from Saussure to Woody Allen (...). When I saw on television the opening of the Olympic Games, with that lone soldier flying by means of a propeller on his back, I said to myself: ‘That must be Eco.’”

We may never be able to explain how to fly across lands and seas on the wings of words — or how to travel with a salmon, reading Proust on an e-book while flying over Texas. But here, we will try to tell how one might “put salt on the tail” of Umberto Eco: a game that can never be won, and for that very reason, never ceases to fascinate.

Americas