UMBERTO ECO is an Italian novelist, medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic. He is the author of several bestselling novels including The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays.

“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away.”

— Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose