A philosophical platypus: for Umberto Eco

When John Hartley first asked me (Patrizia) to write an appreciation for Umberto Eco, I started wondering what would be the most appropriate way to honour his memory. Another, necessarily incomplete, exposition of his incredibly extended work? Another attempt to capture his multiform personality, the semiotician and flute player, novelist and collector of ancient books, medievalist scholar and entertaining teller ofjokes? In the days and weeks that followed his death on 19 February 2016, all the newspapers in Italy and in the whole world were full of more or less complete stories of his life, summaries of his books, sketches of his eclectic personality and it seemed useless to me to produce another of these accounts. I thought that maybe it would be interesting to take a more personal point of view, although certainly a more partial one, and to offer to the readers of the International Journal of Cultural Studies the testimony of two different experiences of what it was like to work and study with Umberto: my own and that of Claudio Paolucci, a younger scholar belonging to the last generation of students who graduated with Eco. I was one of Umberto’s first collaborators and thus colleagues; and Claudio is one of his last students. We hope that our co-authored appreciation may throw light on some aspects of Umberto’s personality that are probably less well known to a larger audience, but maybe more meaningful in a personal way than his immense public biography.