The Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco has died aged 84. Eco was born in Alessandria, Northern Italy, in 1932. He developed an interest in medieval philosophy and literature and studied the subjects at the University of Turin in the 1950s. It was around that time that the he turned his back on the Catholic church.
The Name of the Rose was made into a film in 1989 starring Scottish actor Sean Connery. He was later professor emeritus and chairman of the Higher School of Humanities of the University of Bologna. He was the 1992-3 Norton professor at Harvard and taught semiotics at Bologna University and once suggested that writing novels was a mere part-time occupation, saying: “I am a philosopher; I write novels only on the weekends.”
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