WantedInMilan: ” More than 32,000 volumes from the writer’s Milan study now housed at Palazzo Poggi, arranged exactly as he left them. The University of Bologna has opened the Biblioteca Eco, a new public library housing the personal book collection of writer and semiotician Umberto Eco, a decade after his death. The collection, comprising more than 32,000 volumes from Eco’s study in Milan, has found a permanent home in the 20th-century wing of Palazzo Poggi, with its entrance on Piazza Puntoni. Eco, born in Alessandria in 1932, held the chair of semiotics at Bologna’s Alma Mater from 1971 to 2007, making the university one of the world’s leading centres for the study of signs and communication. He died in Milan on 19 February 2016, having achieved global literary fame with novels including The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. A living map of Eco’s thought The collection was donated to the Italian state by Eco’s heirs in 2020, on condition that it be placed on permanent loan to the University of Bologna. Before the move, the library was surveyed shelf by shelf in Milan, with the position of every volume, thematic groupings and connections between authors and disciplines carefully documented, so that the new premises in Bologna could reproduce Eco’s original arrangement exactly, down to which books he kept lying flat and which stood upright. That arrangement follows the “good neighbour” principle developed by art historian Aby Warburg, which Eco adopted for his own shelving: placing seemingly unrelated texts side by side so that unexpected connections between them could emerge. The library’s themed rooms, covering subjects from mediaeval philosophy to popular fiction, comic books and occultism, allow visitors to trace the same interdisciplinary connections that shaped Eco’s own research and writing. Among the holdings are more than 2,000 editions and translations of Eco’s own works, around 600 volumes about him and his work, and a complete run of the magazine Linus, which he co-founded in 1965…”