In a collection of broken, dog-eared and graffitied books in Bologna, Ilaria Maria Sala finds an antidote to a world being muddled by AI
In early July, right in the middle of Bologna’s university citadel, the new Biblioteca Eco (Eco Library) opened its doors to visitors. The location, at 2 Piazza Puntoni, feels like a tribute: philosopher, novelist and all-round polymath Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, Piedmont, and passed away in Milan ten years ago, but Bologna is where he lived for more than 45 years, teaching semiotics at university and putting his own signature on the way this subject is viewed. To this day, Bologna and its university are the places with which he is most closely associated. When, in 1971, Italy’s first multidisciplinary undergraduate degree programme opened in Bologna – called DAMS, which stands for Disciplines of the Arts, Music and Drama – Eco was among its cofounders, becoming the chair of the semiotics department in 1975. That programme started a golden era for the city and its university: culture and counterculture seemed to be coexisting in an exciting continuum, unaffected by self-satisfaction. Eco was an embodiment of this openness: his lectures, his articles and, as we can see now, his shelves juxtaposed with pride the latest comics and obscure interpretations of Ancient Latin texts by medieval scholars.
For many, of course, Eco is first and foremost the author of the novel The Name of the Rose, published in 1980 in Italian, and translated worldwide. But what the new Biblioteca Eco puts on show is his wonderfully obsessive relationship with books: loving, compulsive and very physical. As a bibliophile, he was insatiable: more books are in his country house near Urbino, while his ancient volumes collection, mostly on the occult, alchemy, witchcraft and demonology, the sciences and memory techniques, has been bought by the Braidense library, established in Milan by Maria Theresa of Austria in 1770.
The Biblioteca Eco displays, and makes available to the public, a collection of 32,000 volumes, which have been transported here and arranged on the shelves as close as possible to how they were kept in Eco’s last home, in Milan. This has been done through the meticulous, close-to-obsessive work of photographing every millimetre of the original library and then recreating it exactly. The idea is that the visitor and the reader experience as nearly as possible what Eco would have seen when he looked at his shelves. This means that here, unlike in most libraries, books are kept in double rows, in order to make use of the full depth of the shelves, or that they lie on top of other books, precisely as he left them. Inside the books’ pages, too, are all the things that you are not supposed to do to books, which Eco did to books, and defended doing: scribbling notes with an indelible pen, folding the corners of pages into dog ears, opening books flat even at the expense of the spine. And the range of titles included here is as vast as human curiosity: comics, books on games and Dante Alighieri translated in all possible languages. Thrillers, semiotics, philosophy and everything about world religions. Novels and botany. These are books that have been lived in, broken in like a pair of comfortable shoes, roughed up and cuddled. (During my visit, the library’s curators said that the collection provides an excuse for couples to reopen debates about book etiquette: See? He did it too!)
Eco was a defender of owning books, regardless of how many one could actually read, finding that their physical presence, the tactile pleasure of being among them, already initiated a dialogue between the printed pages and their owner. Online there is a short clip of Eco walking at home, as he turns one corner after the other, in a seemingly endless loop of overflowing bookshelves, tables piled high with volumes, more volumes and a few notebooks, and then more bookshelves, opening on more brimming bookshelves.
Paper was everything, even if Eco was fascinated by technology, and used computers and e-readers gladly as acceptable tools. As we increasingly struggle to keep the world of AI distinguishable from the word of reality, the new Biblioteca Eco enters the fray as an amazing antidote to it.
From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.