2022 (EN)

Visitors - in accordance with Covid 19 rules - and a great influx of links and contacts on the multimedia platform of the Museum Of Peace - MAMT for the ninetieth anniversary of Umberto Eco's birth. It is no exaggeration to call him one of the greatest and most influential Italian intellectuals of the 20th century. On 5 January 2022, Umberto Eco would have been ninety years old.
"He sadly left six years ago, on 19 February 2016, leaving a devastating void in the Italian intellectual world. Because Eco was the magician of witty analysis, of constructive and sometimes irreverent commentary, of acute observation on current reality. What we miss most about him today is precisely the clarity of vision that he projected on everything, illuminating it with a new light," said Michele Capasso, President of the Fondazione Mediterraneo, who was moved to conclude his personal remembrance:
"What would Umberto Eco say about the current situation? How many rivers of words would he say about the pandemic, about the discussions that are currently inflaming public opinion? The silence that follows these questions is deafening, because most of all the reference - the lucid wisdom - that Umberto embodied through his impartial interpretation is missing. And it is precisely from the weight of this question and, above all, from the absence of his answer that we can determine how unbridgeable Eco's loss is for the current cultural world. Today we can trace his opinion through his writings, recompose it through a careful analysis of the words he spoke. We can make our own Umberto Eco's clear-sightedness, his ability to look at the world through the lens of culture; but it is certainly not the same thing'.
And President Capasso recalled Umberto Eco's immediate adhesion in 1997 to the Foundation's International Scientific Committee and his support to the Rector of the University of Bologna for the creation of the "Almamed" Network: an autonomous section of the Fondazione Mediterraneo that still brings together the main Mediterranean universities to spread values and knowledge to the new generations.
The Museum's large videowalls contain images, hyperlinks and the main texts written by Umberto Eco.