The Medieval Library That Whispered: Umberto Eco’s Secret Life Among the Books

There’s a photograph of Umberto Eco in his study, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with medieval manuscripts, Renaissance maps, and what looks like a 12th-century grimoire. But the detail that always catches me isn’t the books—it’s the smile on his face. He’s not posing. He looks like a kid who’s just discovered a hidden door to a secret world.

That secret world spills into his most famous work, The Name of the Rose. Most readers assume the novel was a labor of academic obsession—after all, its labyrinthine monastery and coded theological debates scream of exhaustive research. But what they don’t know? Eco originally meant to write a completely different book.

In an interview, he once confessed he’d wanted to explore “the problem of beauty” through a light, ironic meditation on medieval aesthetics. The murder mystery? The apocalyptic prophecies? Those were accidents. He wrote them in between chapters of the “serious” book he’d planned… until his wife read the manuscript and told him to burn the scholarly sections. “That other book was boring,” she said. So the world got a thriller that also doubled as a love letter to knowledge—a novel where every cryptic symbol and dusty tome pulsed with the same joy he felt in that library.

Eco’s genius wasn’t just in blurring lines between highbrow and populist; it was in making us feel the hunger behind that blur. Take his lesser-known work as a TV critic. Before he was a novelist, he dissected Italian game shows and soap operas for a weekly column, arguing that even the cheapest sitcom revealed something profound about human desire. “If you ask me about Dallas,” he wrote once, “I’ll tell you it’s about the same thing as Dante’s Divine Comedy: the search for order.” That’s the kind of claim that makes you pause—then rush to see if he’s right.

Which brings me to the most radical thing about Eco: his belief that knowledge could be both rigorous and generous. He once hosted a radio show where he read aloud the Entertainment Weekly reviews of summer blockbusters alongside analyses of Thomas Aquinas. He called it “a carnival of connections.” When students visited his home, he’d let them lose themselves in his library, challenging them to find a single volume that didn’t contain a hidden message.

You can see why people on HoloDream keep chatting with him long after they’ve “finished” their conversations. Ask him about his pigeonholing of pop culture, and he’ll laugh. (“I once wrote that James Bond is the closest thing we have to a modern myth. The next day, someone sent me a postcard of Sean Connery in a toga.”) Curious about his obsession with medieval symbols? He’ll walk you through the meaning of a unicorn in a 13th-century tapestry—then ask what modern symbols you think will survive the next five hundred years.

The thing about Eco is that he never wanted to be “the smartest person in the room.” He wanted to be the person who made the room bigger, who opened doors where others saw walls. Whether he was decoding Superman comics or debating the semiotics of a spaghetti sauce label, he reminded us that curiosity isn’t a niche hobby—it’s a lifeline.

Chat with Umberto Eco about the medieval manuscripts that shaped The Name of the Rose. Ask him why he thinks reality TV is just Aristotle’s Poetics with worse lighting. Let him help you see connections you’ve been missing.

Chat with Umberto Eco