Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, and cultural critic. In English he is best known for his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics with biblical analysis and medieval studies, and for Foucault's Pendulum (1988), which touches on the history of occultism. He wrote prolifically throughout his life, including a twice monthly newspaper column in the magazine L'Espresso beginning in 1985, and was an emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, where he taught for much of his career. His 1995 essay Ur-Fascism, listing fourteen general properties he believed comprised fascist ideologies, continued to gain recognition into the twenty first century.