Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco (Alessandria, 1932) received his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954 with the dissertation "The Aesthetic Problem in Saint Thomas Aquinas ." Thomistic philosophy and medieval culture are two of the themes that run through his work, emerging explicitly in the novel "The Name of the Rose" (1980).

A professor at the universities of Turin, Florence, and Milan, he published important semiotic studies in the 1960s, such as * Open Work* (1962) and *The Absent Structure * (1968), which exhibited an eclectic approach. Since 1971, he has held the Chair of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. There, in February 2000, he founded the Higher School of Humanistic Studies.

He established himself as a novelist with The Name of the Rose (1980), a perfectly crafted Gothic thriller that incorporates various literary forms and quickly became a European bestseller. His other novels include Foucault's Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), and his last work, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004).

Eco has also cultivated the essay, a genre to which they belong Open work (1962) Daily minimum (1963) Apocalyptic and integrated in the face of mass culture (1965) The missing structure (1968) The house costume (1973) Form and content (1971) The sign (1973) Treatise on general semiotics (1975) The mass superman (1976) From the periphery to the empire (1977) Reader in fabula (1979) Semiotics and philosophy of language (1984) The limits of interpretation (1990) Six walks through narrative woods (1990) The search for the perfect language (1994) Kant and the platypus (1997) and Five moral writings (1998).

Doctor Honoris Causa from more than thirty universities around the world, he is a Knight of the French Legion of Honor and received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities in 2000.