Let us begin, then, from the end: on 19 February 2016, in his Milan home, Umberto Eco died. He was eighty-four years old, with pancreatic cancer faced with that Piedmontese discretion that is perhaps the only form of heroism Piedmontese allow themselves without blushing, and behind him a corpus of works — novels, essays, treatises, bustine, glosses, prefaces, lectures, interviews, jokes — of such dimensions as to require, for cataloguing alone, a semiotics of its own. He had been born on 5 January 1932, the son of an accountant from Alessandria, in a Piedmont still immersed in fascism — and fascism, as we shall see, would never cease to occupy his thoughts, because certain illnesses of the spirit never heal; at most they go into remission.

But it is not death that we wish to speak of here. Nor life either, at least not directly. We wish to speak of what happened afterward, and which in truth had already happened before, since Eco, as a good semiotician, knew that every text acts not only through what it says, but also — and above all — through what it does not say, through what it keeps silent, through what it refers to elsewhere. Semiotics, he wrote in A Theory of Semiotics in 1975, is “the discipline that studies everything that can be used in order to lie.” It is a definition many have quoted without understanding: it does not mean that semiotics is the science of lying, but that it is the science of the possible — that is, of everything that might be different from how it appears, of everything that needs to be interpreted because it is never given transparently. A discipline of suspicion, then. A detective’s discipline.

This is what happened: in his will, with a formula that had all the flavor of one of his Bustina di Minerva, Eco asked his wife Renate and his children Carlotta and Stefano not to authorize conferences, seminars, study days, or public events dedicated to him for the ten years following his death. The news was made public by the widow to the semiotician Patrizia Violi, his former collaborator at the University of Bologna, in March 2016 — one month after his passing — and from there it bounced across the press with the effect of a final twist. Mandatory silence, at least until 2026.

Here we are: it is 2026. The gates have just been opened. And — as was foreseeable, because foreseeability is the only form of prophecy granted to rationalists — the academic, publishing, and media worlds have rushed to occupy that empty space with the voracity of a gas expanding into a vacuum, according to the principle enunciated not by a semiotician but by Robert Boyle in 1662, who nonetheless would have had nothing against discovering that his law applied equally to intellectuals.

A twenty-four-hour marathon on YouTube — Eco Eco Eco. A World-Wide Talk for Umberto — begun symbolically from the island of Taveuni, in Fiji, where the 180th meridian passes and where Eco had traveled to work on the novel The Island of the Day Before. An international conference in Bologna scheduled for May — Inheriting Eco, they have titled it, with a verb that is already a program. New books, podcasts, television specials, commemorations, “selfies with the corpse” — as someone defined them with a brutality Eco himself would have appreciated, provided it was phrased with adequate irony. The publishing house La nave di Teseo, which Eco had helped found in 2015 together with Elisabetta Sgarbi, publishes The Human Thirst for Prefaces, a collection of introductory texts. Roberto Cotroneo dedicates to him a book entitled simply Umberto. Articles, commemorations, appropriations multiply. Everyone wants a piece of Eco. It is the fate of the great: to become, once dead, the property of everyone — which is equivalent to no longer being anyone’s property.

Everything perfectly understandable, and everything perfectly foreseen. It is legitimate to suspect that Eco, in imposing the decade-long clause, did not at all intend to prevent people from speaking about him — he knew perfectly well that would have been impossible — but rather wished to defer the speaking, to introduce an interval, to create what in music is called a rest, which, as anyone who has listened to Beethoven’s late sonatas knows, is anything but silence: it is the place where meaning condenses.

But here a digression is advisable, because digressions are the soul of encyclopedic thought, and without digressions there is no encyclopedia, and without encyclopedia there is no Eco.

The question of silence as a signifying form is not new. John Cage posed it in 1952 with his famous 4'33", three movements during which the pianist — David Tudor, at the premiere, in the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, on 29 August of that year — does not play a single note. He opens the keyboard lid, closes it again, restarts the stopwatch. The intention, as Cage explained many times (thus betraying the paradoxical nature of the operation, since he explained in words what had been conceived to function without words), was to demonstrate that absolute silence does not exist: in the concert hall, during those four minutes and thirty-three seconds, one heard coughs, chairs creaking, the wind outside the windows, rain beating on the roof, the breathing of the audience, and finally the audience itself speaking or leaving. The silence was full of sounds. The absence was full of presences.

Now, it so happens that Eco knew Cage well — he had discussed him extensively in The Open Work, in 1962, in the context of the aesthetics of indeterminacy — and it is not far-fetched to suppose that the testamentary clause had something of the same logical structure. “Do not speak of me for ten years” is a statement that produces exactly its opposite: it makes people speak, and makes them speak about silence, adding to the discourse on Eco a further interpretive level. Just as 4'33" is not the absence of music but the music of absence, so the ten years of Eco’s silence are not the absence of discourse but discourse on absence — a discourse that grows richer as time passes, because each year of silence adds a question: why did he want it this way? What did he mean? What would he have said, he, about this silence?

Not the name of the rose, then, but the silence of the rose — that stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus that closed the 1980 novel and which, reread today, sounds like an autobiographical prophecy. The rose has passed; of the rose only the name remains, and of the name only naked names: signs without referent, sounds that resound in an empty space. Yet it is precisely in that empty space that meaning continues to work. As in Cage’s 4'33". As in Eco’s testamentary silence.

The parallel with Cage is not accidental, and deserves to be developed, because it touches a sensitive nerve in Eco’s thought: the relationship between form and openness.

The Open Work, published in 1962, is the book with which the young Eco — he was thirty — imposed himself on European culture. The thesis was simple in formulation and revolutionary in its consequences: the contemporary work of art is not a closed message that the recipient passively receives, but a field of possibilities that the recipient is called upon to complete. Joyce, Stockhausen, Calder, Berio: all, in different ways, produced works that did not exist in a single definitive form but in a plurality of possible realizations. The work was open because it left the recipient margins of intervention, of choice, of interpretation.

Cage was the limit case of this aesthetic. In pieces such as the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra of 1958, the instrumental parts could be performed in any combination and order. Indeterminacy was total. And 4'33" carried this logic to its extreme consequences: a work so open as to contain nothing anymore, except the space in which something might happen. Maximum openness coincided with emptying.

Eco, in discussing these cases, was fascinated but also cautious. Openness was a value, but not an absolute value. A work could be open without being empty, and an empty work was not necessarily more open than a full one. The problem was not how much openness to grant, but what kind of cooperation to require from the recipient. This distinction — between productive openness and inert openness — would remain at the center of his thought throughout his life, and would re-emerge forcefully in The Role of the Reader (1979) and later in The Limits of Interpretation (1990), where Eco would take a stand against the drifts of unlimited interpretation: no, one cannot make a text say just anything. The text has rights. Openness has boundaries.

It is a lesson that in 2026 sounds more urgent than ever. The Internet has given us a world in which everything is open: every text is commentable, shareable, decontextualizable, remixable. Openness has become the default condition of communicative existence. But is it productive openness or inert openness? Is it cooperation or dispersion? The model reader of whom Eco spoke — that reader who cooperates with the text to produce meaning — has perhaps transformed into the wild reader who uses the text as a pretext, who bends it to his own purposes, who reduces it to a slogan, who turns it into a meme? The answer, unfortunately, is yes, at least in part. And the fact that Eco himself has become a meme — decontextualized sentences, quotations attributed by hearsay, images with glasses and cigar used to ennoble any banality — only confirms the paradox.

The semiotician, in short, had transformed his own death into a final semiotic act. The decade of silence was a sign. And like every sign, according to the definition Eco himself preferred, it could be used to tell the truth, to tell a lie, or to say something completely different from what appeared.

Valentina Pisanty, his student and a semiotician, wrote in Il Manifesto that the request for silence served to avoid “a mechanical repetition of commonplaces that would have turned the master into a meme, as was already happening when Eco was alive.” She was right. And her observation contains a concept that deserves to be unpacked: social memory, left to itself, does not preserve — it transforms. It does not archive — it distorts. It does not remember — it rewrites. Eco, who had devoted an entire novel to the theme of memory — The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, in 2004, the story of an antiquarian who loses episodic memory and tries to reconstruct it through the comics, songs, and books of his childhood — knew better than anyone that cultural memory is an active process, not a passive deposit. To remember means to choose, and to choose means to exclude, and to exclude means, inevitably, to betray.

The ten years of silence were therefore an attempt to govern the process of the sedimentation of memory. Not to prevent it — that would have been impossible — but to slow it down, to give it time to produce its filters, its selections, its hierarchies. It is, properly speaking, the time of decantation: a term that belongs more to oenology than to philosophy, but that Eco, as a frequenter of good tables, would not have found out of place. Wine freshly bottled is not ready. It needs time for the tannins to soften, the aromas to compose themselves, the excess to settle at the bottom. Ten years are the minimum for a great Barolo. Perhaps Eco, as a Piedmontese, had something of the sort in mind.

There is another aspect of the matter that deserves attention, and it concerns time — not the time of decantation, but the time of history. Ten years are not just any span. They are too long for an emotion, too short for historiography, but sufficient — and here one senses the long gaze of the medievalist — for the dust to settle, the tears to dry, and what remains to be no longer the memory of the man but the meaning of the work.

The difference between 2016 and 2026 is not only chronological: it is epistemological. In 2016 one was still in the midst of the discussion about what the Internet was doing to knowledge, to truth, to democracy. Eco’s famous remark about social media and the “legions of imbeciles” — delivered on 10 June 2015 at the University of Turin, on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree in Communication and Media Cultures — still sounded like a provocation, somewhat snobbish and somewhat apocalyptic, as he himself would have admitted. In 2026, after years of systematic disinformation, deepfakes, generative artificial intelligence, and permanent contextual collapse, that remark sounds like a clinical diagnosis: no longer provocation but report. Time has not blunted Eco’s thought; it has sharpened it.

It is worth remembering, however, what that remark does not say — or rather, what the context in which it was uttered said and that reduction to a slogan has erased. On that occasion Eco did not merely insult social network users. He also said that the real problem was the inability to filter information, and that schools should teach young people to critically evaluate online sources. He said that “newspapers should devote at least two pages to the critical analysis of websites.” He said, in essence, that the problem was not technology but the absence of widespread semiotic education — that is, the absence of that capacity to read signs, to suspect appearances, to distinguish signal from noise, which had been the center of his entire intellectual life. The phrase about the “legions of imbeciles” was the headline, not the article. But that is the fate of headlines: to survive the article, and sometimes to contradict it.

And it is precisely here, in the relationship between sign and meaning, between appearance and reality, between what is seen and what is hidden, that Eco’s thought reveals its most profound — and most unsettling — relevance.

There is something uncanny — in the Freudian sense of Unheimlich, that “uncanny” which is the familiar returning in estranged form — in the fact that today, in 2026, one can converse with a simulation of Umberto Eco generated by artificial intelligence, as indeed happened during the worldwide marathon of 18 February, when Jeffrey Schnapp held a dialogue with an AI trained on Eco’s texts. The semiotician who devoted his life to studying how signs produce meaning finds himself reduced — or perhaps elevated, depending on the point of view — to a linguistic model, that is, to a system that produces signs without meaning, or that produces the appearance of meaning without possessing its substance.

Eco would probably have written a dazzling essay on this situation. And he would probably have begun with a joke — because for him jokes were not an ornament but a method: the quickest way to make the logical structure of a problem emerge, its fundamental incongruity, the point at which the system jams and reveals its own rules. Laughter, in The Name of the Rose, is the key to everything: the secret hidden in the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, the one devoted to comedy, which the old Jorge of Burgos wants to destroy because laughter undermines authority, dissolves fear, and without fear there is no obedience. Laughter is the great enemy of every dogma, and Eco — who was an opponent of dogmas all his life, including those of anti-dogmatism — knew it and practiced it with a constancy bordering on ascetic discipline. Those who knew him recount that he made people laugh, always, and that behind every laugh there was a thesis.

But the essay on artificial intelligence that Eco could not write would, I believe, have been something different from both the uncritical enthusiasm of the integrated and the apocalyptic terror of the catastrophists. It would have been an exercise in applied semiotics: not “AI is good” or “AI is bad,” but “how does AI function as a system of signs? What kind of signification does it produce? What interpretive cooperation does it require? And above all: who is the model reader of a text generated by a machine that does not know it is writing?” Eco, who in A Theory of Semiotics constructed an entire theory of communication based on the distinction between signals and signs, between mechanical processes and interpretive processes, would have had the tools to pose the right questions — those questions that, amid the clamor of the contemporary debate on AI, almost no one poses, because everyone is too busy taking sides.

And he might perhaps have retrieved the concept dearest to him: the encyclopedia. For Eco, knowledge is not organized like a dictionary — linearly, with closed definitions, fixed hierarchies — but like an encyclopedia: a potentially infinite network of references, where each node is connected to other nodes, where every interpretation opens new interpretations, where meaning is never given once and for all but is always in the course of negotiation. The encyclopedia is rhizomatic, open, expandable, and admits contradiction. It is no coincidence that Eco preferred it to the dictionary: the dictionary is reassuring; the encyclopedia is unsettling. The dictionary says “this is the meaning”; the encyclopedia says “this is a meaning, but there are others, and some of them contradict one another.” Generative artificial intelligence, which produces plausible but not necessarily true texts, which simulates competence without possessing it, which confuses statistical accumulation with understanding — is it a dictionary masquerading as an encyclopedia? Or is it a mad encyclopedia that has lost its sense of hierarchy? These are quintessentially Ecoian questions. And the fact that we cannot answer them with certainty is, in itself, the most Ecoian answer possible.

But there is another aspect of Eco’s work that the ten years that have passed have illuminated in a new light, and it concerns the theme of conspiracy — or rather, of the conspiratorial temptation as a pathology of reason.

Foucault’s Pendulum, published in 1988, tells the story of three editors who, for fun, invent a secret Plan — a universal conspiracy linking the Templars to Freemasonry, the Rosicrucians to the secret services, the Cathars to whomever one wishes — and who discover, with horror, that the invented Plan becomes real: someone believes in it, someone takes it seriously, someone is willing to kill for it. Fiction generates reality. The false produces real consequences. The Prague Cemetery, published in 2010, carries this reflection to its extreme consequences, narrating the material fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the most influential and most destructive forgery of modern history.

Eco, in these novels, was not making prophecy — he was making retrospective diagnosis. But the diagnosis, as happens with great clinicians, was valid also for the future. The mechanism he described — the construction of conspiratorial narratives that give order to chaos, that transform complexity into plot, that replace analysis with suspicion — is exactly the mechanism that in the decade following his death invaded the global public sphere, from QAnon to pandemic denialism, from theories of the Great Reset to the thousand variants of contemporary political paranoia. Eco had a name for this phenomenon: he called it “hermetic semiosis,” that is, a way of interpreting signs in which everything is connected to everything, every coincidence is meaningful, every detail is a clue, and the absence of evidence is the strongest evidence of all — because it proves that someone has erased the evidence. It is, literally, interpretation without limits: the exact opposite of the regulated interpretive cooperation that Eco proposed as the model of healthy reading.

The difference between legitimate suspicion and interpretive paranoia — between critical doubt and hermeneutic delirium — is perhaps the most important distinction Eco left us. And it is a distinction that in 2026 is worth more than it was in 1988, because in 1988 conspiracists were a marginal and noisy minority, whereas in 2026 they are a mass phenomenon with measurable political consequences. Foucault’s Pendulum is no longer just a novel: it is a survival manual.

And alongside Foucault’s Pendulum, one must place another text — shorter, more direct, and perhaps even more influential, though in ways Eco could not have foreseen. In 1995, at Columbia University in New York, Eco delivered a lecture entitled Eternal Fascism, in which he enumerated fourteen characteristics of Ur-Fascism: the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, the cult of action for action’s sake, intolerance of disagreement, fear of difference, appeal to frustrated middle classes, obsession with conspiracy, the enemy portrayed as both too strong and too weak at the same time, life conceived as permanent warfare, mass elitism, the cult of heroism and death, machismo, qualitative populism, Newspeak. Not all these traits had to be present: one was enough for the seed to germinate. Fascism, for Eco, was not a coherent ideology but a “blur” — a nebula of attitudes, impulses, and rhetorics that could assume different forms in different eras, adapting to context like a virus that mutates in order to survive.

That text, born as an academic lecture, had an unforeseen and tumultuous second life. After 2016 — the year of Brexit, of Trump’s election, of the rise of populist movements across Europe — it went viral, shared on social media, cited in debates, turned into a checklist. And here another Ecoian paradox opens up: the text was used in exactly the way Eco advised against, that is, as an instrument of mechanical classification rather than as an invitation to critical thought. “How many points out of fourteen does politician X satisfy?” became a recurring question online, as if Ur-Fascism were a scored test and not an exercise in discernment. The irony is fierce: a text that invited reflection on the complexity of the fascist phenomenon was reduced to a meme — precisely the fate Eco feared for his own work and that the testamentary clause attempted, at least in part, to avert.

In the blurb of the first edition of The Name of the Rose, Eco wrote, paraphrasing and overturning Wittgenstein: “What cannot be theorized must be narrated.” It is a sentence that defines him better than any encyclopedic entry, because it reveals the deep conviction that theory and narration are not opposites but complements, that each needs the other, just as the apocalyptic needs the integrated and the integrated needs the apocalyptic, just as laughter needs seriousness and seriousness laughter. Semiotics explains how signs function; the novel shows what happens when signs function badly, or too well, or in ways no one had foreseen. The one without the other would have been abstract; the other without the one would have been blind.

Ten years later, the real question is not what Eco left — he left too much for any inventory to be possible — but how he left it. He left it in open form. The Open Work was not only the title of his 1962 essay; it was a program, a method, a way of being in the world. Every text, Eco said, is a “lazy machine” that requires the cooperation of the reader in order to function. The text does not say everything: it leaves spaces, presupposes competences, counts on the reader filling in the gaps with his or her own encyclopedia. If the reader does not cooperate, the machine stops. If the reader cooperates too much, the machine overheats. The point of balance — the right cooperation, neither too much nor too little — is what Eco called “interpretation.”

Well then: the machine is on, the text is written, the engine is lazy enough. Now it is up to us. It is up to readers to do their job, which is above all a job of interpretation, of suspicion, of doubt — that doubt which Eco opposed to certainty as health is opposed to illness. In a famous letter to Carlo Maria Martini, collected in the volume In What Does He Who Does Not Believe Believe? (1996), Eco wrote that what drives a philosopher to philosophize and a writer to write is the desire “to leave a message in a bottle, so that in some way what one believed in, or what seemed beautiful to us, may be believed or appear beautiful to those who will come.” It is a declaration of secular faith — faith in transmission, in continuity, in the possibility that a sign cast today might be gathered tomorrow by someone who needs it.

The testamentary clause, then, was perhaps a final attempt at semiotic governance: not to prevent the flow of signs, which is impossible, but to slow it; not to erase noise, but to create the conditions in which, within the noise, a signal might still be distinguished. Ten years of pause to allow the signal to emerge. As in music. As in Cage. As in Beethoven’s late sonatas, where the rests are as long as the notes, and sometimes more eloquent.

Eco, on reflection, had always practiced this art of deferment. He waited until he was forty-eight to write his first novel — an age at which many writers have already published their best work and begin to repeat themselves. He waited because he wanted to theorize before narrating, and to narrate only when theory was no longer sufficient. He waited because he knew that haste is the enemy of complexity, and that complexity is the only form of intellectual honesty truly worth the effort.

And when he finally narrated, he did so seven times, with seven novels always different from one another yet linked by an underground thread: the question of truth. From The Name of the Rose (1980) to Numero zero (2015), passing through Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and The Prague Cemetery, each novel posed the same question under a different light: how does one distinguish the true from the false? What happens when the false becomes more persuasive than the true? Who has the power to decide which version of events is the correct one?

Numero zero, the last, is perhaps the most bitter. Written at eighty-three with the fierce lucidity of someone who knows time is short, it tells of a newspaper that will never come out — the “numero zero” of the title is the prototype that precedes publication, the ghost of a newspaper that exists only as an instrument of blackmail and pressure. It is a short, dry, harsh novel, without the luxuriant erudition of the previous books, as if Eco had decided to strip away everything superfluous and leave only the bone. Reread in 2026, in an era in which newsrooms empty, newspapers close, information is increasingly generated by algorithms and increasingly less verified by human beings, Numero zero has the flavor of an autopsy report: the patient is dead, here are the causes.

The last Bustina di Minerva — the column Eco wrote for L’Espresso from 1985 until his death, an exact thirty years of observations in reduced format — was published on 27 January 2016, three weeks before his death. It was devoted to the paintings of Francesco Hayez. Not to fascism, not to social media, not to semiotics: to nineteenth-century Romantic painting. A farewell disguised as art criticism, a final gesture of that encyclopedic freedom that had been the distinctive trait of his intelligence: the right to deal with anything, at any moment, without having to justify the passage from one subject to another, because in the network of the encyclopedia everything is connected to everything, and the most interesting path is always the one you did not expect to take.

But since every self-respecting essay should have the decency not to conclude — because conclusions, like funerals, are ceremonies for those who remain, not for those who have departed — this one will close with an image.

In Eco’s library, the one now being reconstructed and catalogued at the University of Bologna — more than forty thousand working volumes, plus a collection of about thirteen hundred ancient and rare books at the Braidense in Milan, the one he himself christened Bibliotheca semiologica, curiosa, lunatica, magica et pneumatica — the books were not arranged alphabetically or by genre, but according to a logic known only to the owner, a network of proximities and references that replicated, in physical form, the model of the encyclopedia: each book next to another not by classificatory obligation but by secret affinity, by thematic contagion, by what Aby Warburg — the great art historian who had organized his own library according to the same principle — called “the rule of the good neighbor.” One book led to another, one thought opened a corridor toward an adjacent thought, and whoever entered that library never exited at the same point at which he had entered.

Perhaps this is the image that best describes Eco’s legacy: not a monument but a labyrinth, not a closed system but an open network, not an answer but a method for asking questions. The “Room of the Ancients” — as the family called the study where Eco kept his most precious volumes, without telephone, without computer, with the scores and the recorders he played almost every day — was a refuge and an observatory, a place where the past was not dead but continued to speak, in a low voice, to anyone with the patience to listen. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 next to the Malleus Maleficarum of 1492, the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus next to the works of Athanasius Kircher: not a collection for a vain bibliophile, but an archive of “occult knowledge and false knowledge,” as Eco himself defined his ancient collection. Because to understand how truth functions one must study the false. To understand the world one must study the ways in which the world has been misunderstood, distorted, reinvented.