Thinking badly makes you sin, but more often than not you get it right. The famous maxim by Giulio Andreotti could be invoked in the face of silence in the city on the day Umberto Eco would have turned ninety.
Accused of having forgotten the anniversary, the representative of any public or private institution could wash his hands, bringing up the Professor’s will: «And what do you want? He asked us. “No conference, no study day, no meeting on me and my works, my thoughts and my life is authorized for at least ten years”.
Oh God, in Bologna they named the covered square of the Salaborsa library after him, one of the most beautiful and popular places of culture, when a month had passed since his death. And it’s not that they have been excommunicated: the modern library and the Professor’s archive have been hijacked right there, at the University Library of Bologna. Perhaps Eco forgave them, feeling protected by the choice of the place: when he wrote (perhaps thinking of himself) that a street should be forbidden to name a person for at least a hundred years after death, he feared something more than “damnatio memoriae”. And that is that, associated with an infamous street, “the unfortunate’s name would have been used for centuries and centuries for salacious references”. He had even written it. But perhaps he wouldn’t have minded the title of the school where he studied and met those who would become lifelong friends. And it is perhaps to avoid returning to a divisive topic that the silence on Eco’s 90 years is explained, even if an idea was not lacking: the republication in these days of his debut book “Philosophers in freedom”, with nursery rhymes and cartoons . And in today’s times, with Cacciari and Agamben, he would not have lacked other ideas.