Born in Alessandria (Piedmont) on January 5 1932. Died in Milan on February 19 2016.
Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna.
His main work in this field(Trattato di Semiotica Generale, 1975) has been translated into all the languages of culture.
He has had a dual career as a university lecturer and journalist (for RAI from 1954 to 1959, then as a weekly columnist for L'Expresso since 1965). As an academic, he first worked on medieval aesthetics (Turin, 1953-1964 then Milan, Faculty of Architecture, 1964-1965) and visual communication (Florence, 1966-1969). He then specialized in semiotics (theory of the sign, the place of the reader, limits of interpretation). He was Director of the Course in Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna.
He was visiting professor at New York University (1969-1970 and 1976), Northwestern University (1972), Yale (1977, 1980 and 1981) and Columbia University (1978 and 1984).
A visiting professor at the Collège de France, he held the annual European Chair for the 1992-1993 academic year.
Umberto Eco is also known for works of a more mainstream nature, in which he skilfully blends immense erudition with novelistic intrigue, such as The Name of the Rose (1981) and Foucault's Pendulum (1989).