MILAN – The world of letters mourns the death of Umberto Eco, who passed away yesterday at the age of 84. In addition to internationally successful novels, in his long career Eco has been the author of numerous essays on semiotics, medieval aesthetics, linguistics and philosophy. Among his major literary successes ‘The Name of the Rose’ of 1980 and ‘Foucault’s Pendulum ‘ (1988). Let’s see together the 10 most famous books of him.
. TAKE PART IN THE SURVEY: UMBERTO ECO, WHICH IS YOUR FAVORITE OF HIS BOOKS
. 1) The name of the rose
It is a novel written by Umberto Eco and published for the first time by Bompiani in 1980. The work, set at the end of the year 1327, presents itself with a classic literary device, that of the manuscript found, work, in this case, of a monk named Adso da Melk, who, having become old, decides to put on paper the remarkable facts experienced as a novice, many decades ago, in the company of his teacher Guglielmo da Baskerville. The narration takes place inside a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy, and is divided into seven days, marked by the rhythms of monastic life.
. 2) Foucault’s pendulum
A novel that crosses different historical periods. takes place from the early 1960s to 1984 between a Milanese publishing house and a Parisian museum where Foucault’s pendulum is exhibited. It takes place from 1943 to 1945 in a small village between Langhe and Monferrato. It takes place between 1344 and 2000 along the path of the plan of the Templars and the Rosicrucians for the conquest of the world. In summary: three editorial editors, in Milan, after having frequented for too long authors “at their own expense” who dabble in occult sciences, secret societies and cosmic plots, decide to invent, without any sense of responsibility, a Plan. But someone takes them seriously.
. 3) The island of the day before
In the summer of 1643 a young Piedmontese was shipwrecked in the southern seas on a deserted ship. In front of him an Island that he cannot reach. Around him an apparently welcoming environment. Alone, on an unknown sea, Roberto de la Grive sees for the first time in his life skies, waters, birds, plants, fish and corals that he does not know how to name. He writes love letters, through which we can guess his story: a slow and traumatic initiation into the seventeenth-century world of the new science, of the reason of state, of a cosmos in which the earth is no longer at the center of the universe. . Roberto lives his story entirely based on memory and on the expectation of arriving on an island that is not only distant in space, but also in time.
. 4) Number Zero
A perfect manual for bad journalism that the reader gradually does not know if invented or simply filmed live. A story that takes place in 1992 in which many mysteries and follies of the following twenty years are prefigured, just as the two protagonists think that the nightmare is over.
. 5) Three stories
“The bomb and the general”: the melancholy atoms locked inside a bomb and a general who wants to make war at all costs. “The three cosmonauts”: the three suspicious cosmonauts who meet a Martian with six hands. “The Gnomes of Gnu”: a presumptuous emperor who claims to bring civilization to a small, innocent and happy planet. Three stories told by Umberto Eco and illustrated by Eugenio Carmi, for children, for adults, for those in need of fairy tales.
.6) History of the lands and legendary places
Our imagination is populated by lands and places that never existed, from the hut of the seven dwarfs to the islands visited by Gulliver, from the temple of Salgari’s Thugs to Sherlock Holmes’ apartment. But in general it is known that these places were born only from the imagination of a narrator or a poet. On the contrary, and since ancient times, humanity has fantasized about places considered real, such as Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, the lands of the Queen of Sheba, the kingdom of Prete Gianni, the Fortunate Islands … Umberto Eco tells us about them and describes them all.
. 7) The story of “I promessi sposi”
This work is not a rewrite operation, but a passionate tribute to the books we have loved most. Umberto Eco, Alessandro Manzoni: a wedding that needs to be done. Umberto Eco’s story brings the most studied and unjustly hated novel in the history of Italian literature to the new generations. The misadventures of Renzo and Lucia, in a Lombardy dominated by an oligarchy of bullies, and tossed about by the uncontrollable forces of the plague, the revolution, and the inscrutable ones of providence.
. 8) Baudolino
In that area of the lower Piedmont where, years later, Alessandria was born, Baudolino, an imaginative and liar small farmer, conquers Federico Barbarossa and becomes his adopted son. Baudolino talks and invents but, almost by a miracle, everything he imagines produces History. Thus, among other things, he constructs the mythical letter of the Priest Gianni, which promised the West a fabulous kingdom, in the Far East, ruled by a Christian king, which has stirred the imagination of many subsequent travelers, including Marco Polo…
. 9) The mysterious flame of Queen Loana
This novel, although illustrated in color, is dominated by fog. In it Yambo wakes up after an accident that made him lose his memory. Not the memory that neurologists call “semantics” (he remembers everything about Julius Caesar and knows how to recite all the poems he has read in his life), but the “autobiographical” one: he no longer knows his own name, does not recognize his wife and daughters, she remembers nothing of her parents and her childhood.
. 10) The Prague cemetery
Simone Simonini is a forger. He moves to nineteenth-century Europe offering his services to rulers, policemen and secret services. Black masses and bomb attacks, Jesuits, Freemasons, Red Shirts and Carbonari, his bilious genius silently shapes history, sowing behind him a trail of ruins and pain. From the shipwreck in which Ippolito Nievo dies, to the Dreyfus affair, to the spectacular invention of the Protocols of the Elders of Sion.
.
