Abstract

Alberto Asor Rosa tracks an intense, personal memory of Umberto Eco focusing on his extraordinary human and intellectual complexity; his great contribution to the Italian studies, often left in the shade by the production of successful fiction; the encroaching from semiotics to linguistics, anthropology, literature and the cultural debate; the extraordinary nature, the vitality and compelling humor, not detached, in Asor Rosa's view, from an inner background of melancholy. Through the words of Eco pronounced on the occasion of the presentation of the "Bollettino di Italianistica", 2, 2013, Asor Rosa recalls the friendship between Eco and himself, a "meeting of parallels" that have been "often intersected"; he recalls the encounter at a conference of the "Gruppo 63", the Dante studies they both produced, the alike experience of the autobiographical fiction («a case where the parallel met perhaps too much»).