Umberto Eco e la scienza dei segni

There is a semiotician and novelist who taught the entire world to distrust appearances: his name is Umberto Eco.

A professor at the University of Bologna, Eco became one of the most translated and well-known Italian intellectuals of the twentieth century.

His discipline, semiotics, studies signs: not only words, but anything that produces meaning.

A traffic light, an outfit, an advertisement: everything, according to Eco, communicates through a system of shared signs.

Here is his most famous definition: semiotics is the discipline that studies everything that can be used to lie.

In 1962, with the essay The Open Work, Eco proposed an idea that was revolutionary at the time.

A text, he argued, does not have a single fixed meaning: it is the reader who completes its sense through interpretation.

This insight anticipated by decades the reader-reception theories that would later become central to literary studies.

However, Eco warned against an opposite risk: so-called overinterpretation.

Interpreting freely does not mean that every reading is valid: the text itself sets limits on what it can mean.

In 1980, with the novel The Name of the Rose, Eco put these ideas into practice, achieving worldwide success.

The medieval mystery set in an abbey becomes, beneath the surface, a reflection on signs and their misreadings.

Eco moved naturally between high culture and popular culture: he wrote about Thomas Aquinas and about Superman with the same rigour.

According to him, the meaning of a sign depends on a shared cultural encyclopedia between the speaker and the listener.

He taught us that what we perceive as natural is in fact a system of signs that we have learned to read.

Reading the world critically, for Eco, remains an act of freedom.